The debate: my presentation

My presentation is provided here. This is being posted at the start of the event.

I HUGELY appreciate the comments that you provided on that one slide [link], both in the comments and sent via email. I definitely got the message.

I will be very interested in your reactions to my presentation [ debate ]. My talking points are provided below, with some of the ppt slides.

1 Cover

Good evening everyone. Thank you very much for coming, I look forward to our conversation this evening.

2 Agreement/disagreement

There is widespread agreement on these basic tenets:

Surface temperatures have increased since 1880

Humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet

However, there is substantial disagreement about the issues of greatest consequence:

Whether the recent warming has been dominated by human causes

How much the planet will warm in the 21stcentury

Whether warming is ‘dangerous’

How we should respond to the warming

I have bolded the two issues that are the focus of this conversation.

Now there is nothing wrong or bad about scientific disagreement. In fact, the scientific process thrives in the face of disagreement, which motivates research in new directions.

3 Disagreement: causes of climate change

On the left hand side is the perspective of a stable climate that changes in response to changes in atmospheric CO2. In other words, carbon dioxide as the climate control knob. It’s a simple and seductive idea.

However some scientists think that this is a misleading oversimplification. They regard climate as a complex nonlinear dynamical system, with no simple cause and effect. Climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways, owing to natural internal variability associated with large-scale ocean circulations.

4 Elephant

Now these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Proponents of the CO2as control knob idea acknowledge the existence natural variability but dismiss it as noise that averages out. Proponents of the natural variability arguments acknowledge the impact of CO2, but consider it to be a modest wedge that projects onto the natural modes of climate variability.

The point of this cartoon is that if you only look at one part of the elephant, you will misdiagnose. You need to look at the entire elephant.

The bottom line is that we don’t yet have a unified theory of climate variability and change that integrates all this.

5 Disagreement: cause of climate change

So does this rather arcane scientific debate actually matter? Well, yes it does.

If you assume that carbon dioxide is the control knob for climate, than you can control climate by reducing CO2emissions.

If you assume that climate change primarily occurs naturally, then the Earth’s climate is largely uncontrollable, and reducing CO2emissions will do little or nothing to change the climate.

My personal assessment aligns with the right-hand side, emphasizing natural variability. However, the IPCC and the so-called consensus aligns with the left hand side. About 10 years ago, I also aligned with left hand side, because I thought supporting the IPCC consensus was the responsible thing to do.

Here is how and why I changed my mind.

6 Policy cart before scientific horse

In 2010, I started digging deeper, both into the science itself and the politics that were shaping the science. I came to realize that the policy cart was way out in front of the scientific horse.

The 1992 UN Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the warming was caused by humans. There was tremendous political pressure on the IPCC scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which resulted in a manufactured consensus.

7 You find what you shine a light on

Here is how the so-called consensus and increasing confidence in human-caused global warming became a self-fulfilling prophesy.

You find what you shine a light on. In other words, we have only been looking at one part of the elephant.

Motivated by the UN Climate treaty and the IPCC and government funding, climate scientists have focused primarily on human-caused climate change. Other factors important for understanding climate variability and change have been relatively neglected. I have highlighted long-term ocean oscillations and solar indirect effects, since I think that these are potentially very important on decadal to century timescales.

8 The sea level rise alarm

One of the most consequential impacts of a warming climate is sea level rise. These two statements by climate scientists typify the alarm over sea level rise:

The red curve shows global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels. You can see that global sea levels were rising steadily long before fossil fuels emissions became substantial. You can also see that the steep increase in emissions following 1950 is associated with very little sea level rise between 1950 and 1990.

An uptick in sea level rise occurred in the 1990’s, which is circled. Lets take a closer look to see what is causing this.

10 What is causing recent sea level rise?

Since 1993, global satellite data have provided valuable information about sea level variations and glacier mass balance. This figure shows a recent analysis of the budget of sea level rise since 1993. You can see that overall the rate of sea level rise has increased since 1993.

What is causing this increase? The turquoise region on the bottom of the diagram relates directly to expansion from warming. You actually see a decrease until about 2009, which has been attributed to the cooling impact following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1992.

What stands out as causing the increase in the rate of sea level rise is the growing contribution from Greenland, which is the dark blue area on top. Hence the recent increase in the rate of sea level rise is caused by Greenland melting.

11 Variations in Greenland glacier mass balance

So, is the Greenland melting caused by increasing CO2 emissions?

This figure shows the Greenland mass balance for the 20th century. Ice sheet mass balance is defined as increase from snowfall, minus the decrease from melting. You can see the negative mass balance values after 1995, reflecting mass loss that raises sea level. If you look earlier in the record, you see even larger negative values particularly in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Clearly, the high surface mass loss rates of recent years are not unprecedented, even in the 20thcentury.

Greenland was anomalously warm in the 1930’s and 1940’s. What caused this?

The bottom figure shows variations in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which is an important mode of natural internal climate variability. The AMO is a powerful control on the climate of Greenland.

Ingeneral, years with positive AMO index are associated with a mass loss for Greenland, whereas negative AMO index is associated with a mass gain.

12 IPCC AR5 quotes on sea level rise

From this analysis, I can only conclude that CO2 emissions are not the main cause of sea level rise since the mid 19thcentury.

The scientific evidence that I’ve shown you on the preceding slides is well known to the IPCC. Here are some statements that the most recent IPCC report made on sea level change and Greenland:

13 To what extent are man-made CO2 emissions contributing to climate change?

I’ve been asked to respond to the question “To what extent are man-made CO2 emissions contributing to climate change?”

The short answer is: ‘we don’t know.’ The reason is that we don’t know how to disentangle natural internal variability from the effects of CO2–driven warming

Even the IPCC doesn’t claim to know exactly. The most recent IPCC assessment report says it is ‘extremely likely’ to be ‘more than half.’ ‘More than half’ is not very precise.

Given the IPCC’s neglect of multi-decadal and longer time scales of natural internal variability, I regard the extreme confidence of their conclusion to be unjustified

So here is my personal assessment, using the jargon of the IPCC: Man-made CO2emissions are as likely as not to contribute less than 50% of the recent warming

14 Should we reduce emissions to prevent warming?

Even if you believe the climate model projections, there is still genuine disagreement regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response.

One side argues that reducing CO2emissions are critical for preventing future dangerous warming of the climate. The other side argues that any reduction in warming would be minimal and at high cost, and that the ‘cure’ could be worse than the ‘disease’.

15 Climate pragmatism

What makes most sense to me is Climate Pragmatism, which has been formulated by the Hartwell group. Climate pragmatism has 3 pillars:

These are no regrets policies that do not require agreement about climate science or the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gases

16 Madhouse effect

I would like to make a few comments on the state of the scientific and public debate on climate change.

Here is my take on the Madhouse effect. The madhouse that concerns me is one that has been created by climate scientists. The madhouse is characterized by

Rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change

Enforcement of a politically-motivated, manufactured ‘consensus’

Attempts to stifle scientific and policy debates

Activism and advocacy for their preferred politics and policy

Self-promotion and ‘cashing in’

Public attacks on other scientists that do not support the ‘consensus’

Hmmm . . . maybe I should write a book.

17 Personal statement

In closing, I would like to make a personal statement, to clarify my motives

I regard my job as a scientist to critically evaluate evidence and to continually challenge and reassess conclusions drawn from the evidence.

A year ago I resigned my tenured faculty position because of academic political pressures that interfered with doing my job. My resignation was a direct result of ‘science madhouse effect’ discussed on the previous slide.

I am now working in the private sector as President of Climate Forecast Applications Network

My direct engagement with public is via my blog Climate Etc. where we discuss a broad range of topics related to climate science and policy. I hope you’ll join us at judithcurry.com.

Judith, good luck in the debate but I’m rooting for Michael and the precautionary principle. What is so puzzling about your position is why you would take the risk of altering the climate that has enabled humanity to thrive and grow. What if you are wrong and by the time we realize it – the proof you say is lacking now – it is too late to reverse a runaway positive feedback loop? We don’t need to burn fossil fuels to power our planetary civilization. Why take the risk?

Interesting that you cite “history” on a scientific blog. In fact, archeology research has shown a very strong correlation between environmental degradation and civilization collapse. The more we heat the atmosphere with CO2 production the more risk we face of altering the climate in a direction that will not support civilization as well as we have enjoyed over the past 10+ millenia. It’s kind of hard to feed people when the farmlands are in chronic drought. Judith seems to ignore the risk to curry favor with her fanboys.

Interesting that you indulge in ad homs on a scientific bog. Dr. Curry expressed her opinion based on her knowledge of the science. Why don’t you enlighten us on where she is wrong. Got science, robot?

We don’t need to burn fossil fuels to power our planetary civilization.

Currently, this is patently untrue. If fossil fuels were to suddenly disappear, most of us would die. As we move past fossil fuels (most likely with nuclear), we may still have to make hydrocarbon fuels to power civilization.

We are not there yet but getting close rapidly. With a combination of renewable energy, storage technology, improved efficiency, reduced energy consumption by individuals, and eventually CO2 removal we can get the current global average 410 ppm CO2 back down to around 350. And, yes, I would support in the mix nuclear power if built with latest generation design.

“We are not there yet but getting close rapidly…” Fine, fine. Hardly anyone has a problem with that. Keep making alternative energy sources cheaper, and pretty soon the developing world will choose them without coercion.
In the meantime, you need to choose: most of the new CO2 is already coming from the developing world, and that will be more and more true. Are you willing to suppress their development to slow the process, or are you willing to tolerate more CO2 to allow them to develop normally till non-fossil fuels take over because they’re cheaper?
I personally would rather deal with the fallout of more CO2 rather than allow literally hundreds of millions of people to die in poverty earlier than they would have.

I’d apply the precautionary principle a different way. There’s a danger that man-made CO2 is all that is staving off the incipient ice age. I don’t want to risk killing most of the human race by causing the end of the Holocene Interglacial. Why on Earth would you risk that?

Also, there’s a danger that you’re soul will burn in eternal torment if you don’t accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and there’s not much of a downside, so can I assume you’ve done that?

No really – I was quoting the urban doofus hipsters at the Breakthrough Institute. They are journalists and political scientists – without much of a clue on the details of effective strategies. Both the devil and the opportunity are in the details – but they are correct in a broad perspective. I am happy to go along with a political consensus on rational ways forward.

The causes of global warming is an interesting scientific discussion, but I hold the position that it’s quite irrelevant for decision makers. They should rather focus on how to address the world’s energy needs. Fossil fuel is stone age technology, it’s much more expensive than we’d like, and it’s a limited resource. We need to move on to the next technology level (but let’s not forget that fossil fuel has been a necessary step on the technology ladder). The world needs cheap and abundant energy to fight poverty, which will put a cap on the population growth, which in turn puts less pressure on the environment. Obviously, that near free energy can’t come from fossil sources. Fixing emissions, whether important or not, will merely be a side effect of solving these more pressing problems. Currently, however, the climate debate is a distraction, and the nuclear word is taboo, so people of the future might wonder what took us so long. We have important work to do, but we are distracted and waste time talking about the weather and fearing nuclear ghosts.

Great presentation. The biggest thing that opened my eyes to the politicization of climate research was the aggressive stifling of any debate on the subject. Any attempt to stifle debate in science is evidence of bias. I admire Dr. Curry for her courage.

My eye opener was the use of persuasive wording, the omission of well established science, and being disregarded as a reviewer.

Here is an example:

“Debates about anthropogenic origins aside, scientific evidence demonstrates that the Earth’s climate is changing. Many species are responding to this changing climate by shifting their geographic ranges. In response to climate change, we should expect both an influx of new species to geographic locations and a concomitant loss of species that have historically thrived within those locations. The differential rates at which species will shift their ranges will also result in a reshuffling of species relationships, ecological processes and related ecosystem services.”

The problem I have with that paragraph, as someone who has some knowledge of the subject, is that we know the statement to be true because it already happened, and is still happening.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have more confidence in knowing the things that have happened and are happening than I do the things that might happen.

So rather than publishing meaningful information, this author chose to be condescending and ignorant with their effort to be an alarmist.
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i always bristle when a comparison is made with sea level rise and emissions. The atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rate was about 2 ppm per decade in the mid nineteenth century and only grew to 3 ppm per decade by the mid twentieth century. That’s not a whole lot of difference over time. On the other hand, emissions increased thirty fold over the same time period. (i think the proper comparison should be made with the growth rate, and not emissions)…

Plotting sea level rise versus some indicator of anthropogenic forcing is not an attempt to identify its cause. It rather conveys two powerful messages:
1. Our contribution has not produced any perceptible effect on sea level rise.
2. A reduction in anthropogenic emissions should have a near zero effect on sea level rise.

One of the most consequential impacts of a warming climate is sea level rise.

I doubt this is correct. the integrated assessment model, FUND3.9, estimates the economic impact of sea level rise this century (using the IPCC AR5 central estimate) would be a negligible 0.03% of GDP in 2100.

Well, not, not really. It’s just saying what the FUND3.9 IAM projects would be the economic impact of projected sea level rise by 2100, where the projected sea level is as per IPCC WR5 central projection.

You don’t need to know CO2 and CH4 for this. You just need to know the projected amount of sea level rise (plus a whole pile of other parameters). If you want to know the other parameters you can always look it up in the FUND3.9 documentation and tables here: http://www.fund-model.org/versions.

By the way, no one is claiming the IAMs are perfect, but they are what are being used to justify policy and hence that global warming is dangerous or catastrophic. This is the point I’ve been making for a long time – i.e. the IAMs need to be independently tested and validated with empirical data.

Re #13 I continued to be baffled by this argument as it seems to rely on a particular semantic interpretation of the IPCC WG1AR5 wording which is clearly contradicted by figure 10.5 of that document. Without that one is left with an assertion without evidence.

Perhaps, but what then is the basis for “Man-made CO2emissions are as likely as not to contribute less than 50% of the recent warming”?

That statement seems to imply a central estimate for natural warming over the period which is positive and of similar magnitude to AGW while giving no hint as to how such an estimate might have been made or what mechanism might be responsible.

Warming during this interglacial is not in dispute. The basis for the statement, I assume, is low confidence that anyone can identify what amount warming is due to humans, but I agree that the wording is not easy to read. I also don’t like how the slide starts off with “climate change” and seamlessly move in to “global warming.”
I could see potentially identifying what amount of warming is due to humans, I cannot imagine anyone actually identifying the impacts to climate because of it.

” The basis for the statement, I assume, is low confidence that anyone can identify what amount warming is due to humans . . .”

Perhaps, I’m not being clear. Low confidence in the attribution justifies the statement, “The short answer is: ‘we don’t know.’ The reason is that we don’t know how to disentangle natural internal variability from the effects of CO2–driven warming.” This begs the question of whether low confidence in the attribution is well supported, but that’s a separate point.

Low confidence in the attribution doesn’t justify, “Man-made CO2emissions are as likely as not to contribute less than 50% of the recent warming” which is a specific attribution statement made after arguing that we don’t know enough to make a specific attribution statement.

The argument is essentially “we don’t know the answer but it’s 50%”, the silliness of which is, I would think, is self-evident.

Mark B — Uncertainty is the things we don’t know. Why would one give a mechanism for a thing one is saying we don’t understand? How do we estimate the thing we are saying cannot be reliably estimated?

For example, if one says “Tropical Depression Bob is likely as not to contribute less than 50% of the weekly rainfall in Florida two weeks from now” we don’t object on the basis that we don’t know where the other rain is coming from, we just understand that weekly rainfall and hurricane paths are hard to predict in certain ranges, moreso the farther in the future we try to predict.

Good presentation. I might have added a slide on costs. There are costs to stronger hurricanes, and there is a slight trend upward in the ratio of major hurricanes to all hurricanes worldwide. If this continues, cleanup costs will rise.

However, regardless of cleanup costs, we must spend money to mitigate hurricanes, storm surges, floods, and other weather disasters. Miami 1926 is still the highest cost hurricane to date. Inland flood costs are dropping over time. Costs for drought are harder to calculate, but at least the in US the dust bowl costs were far higher than anything since. Strong tornadoes seem to the on the decline and costs are flat anyway.

So while there are costs to warming-related weather events, it is poor scientific practice to assign all costs of various weather events to manmade warming. Also poor practice to fail to account for GDP growth as it takes into account population, value of infrastructure, etc.

Mostly we need to recognize that expenditures for weather disaster prep are not optional and don’t go away even if we magically stop producing CO2.

Roberto, there’s an ancient and well-known story about five blind men examining an elephant and coming to very different conclusions as to what it was. For example, one examines a leg and says it’s like a tree trunk, another examines the tail and says it’s like a brush. Hence Javier’s choice of an elephant. The message, of course, is that an examination of any phenomenon, if it is to be properly understood, needs to be exhaustive rather than partial – which is Judith’s point.

Judith,
I hope you do well in the debate even though I think the outlook for the environment is very poor. As Kahneman observed: “I really see no path to success… climate change is not just a political problem, it’s a psychological one. In theoretical terms, it’s the perfect problem: climate change has no single identity, no single cause, no single solution, and no single enemy.

IBM’s Project Debater uses two core components. The software can pull sentences and quotes to support its position from a corpus of hundreds of millions of documents. It also has a framework of pre-built arguments, and even jokes, that it seeks opportunities to deploy.

Every time it debates it has more data, more experience and better strategies.

Does this language include Coronal Mass Discharge, solar wind, and other electrical solar activity. As we head toward a Grand Solar Minimum we expect the incidence of cosmic radiation to increase affecting cloud formation. Some are expecting a Mini Ice Age as was experienced during the period from 1645 ~ 1715.

The suggestion that only 50% of the warming is manmade is not supported by any evidence, and none is shown in this presentation either. Even the Lewis and Curry papers attribute 100% with more in the pipeline (they recognize the positive imbalance) given their own selection of endpoints. So that 50% claim is out of thin air, and appears more wishful than scientific. Also the other part of the IPCC statement on attribution was not mentioned. They say extremely likely most AND most likely all. That last part puts the peak of the distribution at 100%.

I said the suggestion that only 50% of the warming is manmade is NOT supported by any evidence. Pay attention. If she gave any evidence of that assertion, you need to point it out. The Lewis and Curry papers support 100% based on observations and she won’t mention those papers either. It’s all just very self-contradictory. You have to decide whether you believe Lewis and Curry or just this presentation. They say opposite things.

You don’t seem to understand that the observation-based argument made by Lewis and Curry is that it is 100% manmade plus more in the pipeline, and they don’t even need a high sensitivity with their other assumptions. If you want to complain or diss a paper with evidence, that is one place to start.

No reference in your comment I responded to our the two since. Anyway, not point in wasting time reading your click-bate if you can’t be bothered providing a short succinct summary of the evidence that supports your belief.

You didn’t answer my question. I said there is no point reading your click-bate if you cannot provide a short succinct summary of the evidence to support your beliefs. You are the alarmist, but it seems you have no evidence to support your alarmist beliefs.

You still have not explained what evidence you have to support your beliefs that most global warming is manmade, yet you criticise others for not providing evidence that less than half is man made. Rather hypocritical, don’t you agree?

As I said, Lewis and Curry give you the evidence if you would bother to look at it. Their quoted imbalance is still positive despite all the warming we have already had. Their ECS is larger than their TCR because more warming is in the pipeline. These are the characteristics of a 100%+ attribution.

You said that ECS>TCR are “the characteristics of a 100%+ attribution”.

I asked you to prove that.

But you have not done so.

If you cannot answer the question, then admit you are wrong.

If you do not admit when wrong it demonstrates intellectual dishonesty. Signs #4 and #5 (also signs 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 are applicable to some extent)https://Jim D,judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/

This is a corollary of the positive imbalance which Lewis and Curry accept from measurements. Do you even know what a positive imbalance means? I have to know what level I am shooting for here. How do you interpret a positive imbalance? Do you accept it from observations as Lewis and Curry do?

Let’s imagine that you have read Lewis and Curry and you remember that they have an equation like TCR=A/B and ECS=A/(B-C), and you may even remember that C is the imbalance and it is positive. Mathematically this means ECS>TCR. You don’t understand the connection between a positive imbalance and ECS>TCR, but there it is.

This is why I ask you if you even understand what a positive imbalance is. It means the forcing has exceeded the warming which is >100% attribution because anthropogenic forcing is by far the dominant part (again see Lewis and Curry to understand what I am saying here). Is it a complete surprise to you that anthropogenic forcing dominates? I still don’t know which part you don’t understand. All the links in the chain have been presented.

Power flux imbalances – energy in less energy out from CERES – change from negative to positive on an annual basis. The average is 0.8W/m2 – consistent with rates of ocean warming. The trend over the period of record is negative. Such large swings in imbalances cannot be due to greenhouse gases.

Annual variability has significant implications for ocean heat change. Ocean heat does not change slowly as a result of greenhouse gases and thermal inertia but warms and cools rapidly in response to the very large annual signal.

Peter, it is an argument based on logic.
I. The imbalance is positive (ref. Lewis and Curry).
Ia. This means that the forcing exceeds the warming.
Ib. This means we are still below the equilibrium temperature even after all this warming, i.e., there is warming in the pipeline (ECS>TCR)
II. The forcing is dominated by manmade components (ref. Lewis and Curry).
IIa. Natural variations have been positive and negative in the period.
IIb. You can select endpoints to cancel natural variations (ref. Lewis and Curry).
I and II together logically lead to manmade forcing accounts for all the warming and more in the pipeline which is also known as >100% anthropogenic attribution.
I give references to Lewis and Curry, but really it is to reference almost anyone actively working in the field of EBMs, and there are many of those papers in addition to AR5 itself. Note also that this is all observation based and models don’t come into it.

You still have not provided proof that ECS>TCR means 100%+ attribution. That’s the statement you made and you cannot support it. It’s clearly wrong because ECS and TCR say nothing about attribution. You are clearly wrong but don’t have the integrity to admit you are wrong.

OK, that was the mathematical argument I gave you a day ago. Once again. A positive imbalance makes ECS>TCR and also means that the forcing exceeds the warming, and with the forcing being almost entirely anthropogenic (especially with chosen endpoints), you get that anthropogenic forcing accounts for all the observed warming and more to come, which is >100% attribution of warming to anthropogenic forcing.
Once you show (1) that the warming lags the forcing (positive imbalance) and (2) that the forcing is primarily to entirely anthropogenic, depending on your endpoints, you get that conclusion. You haven’t yet disagreed with any of the two steps in the logical argument, which I think is telling, but you seem not to see how it follows.

I have answered it, and you don’t understand the answer, nor are you telling me what part you don’t understand. This is not very helpful for a proper discussion. There are two parts to understand first.
1. The imbalance is positive (ECS>TCR in EBMs)
2. The forcing is dominated by anthropogenic additions.
If you disagree with these statements you have to say so, otherwise you won’t understand the explanation at all.

A discussion requires a person to say why they think the other person is wrong. This is what you have completely lacked so far. Your side of the argument amounts to the words “I don’t believe you” so far. That is not how to have a rational argument. Say why, otherwise I am just shooting in the dark to explain it.

TCR = temperature change over forcing change
ECS = temperature change over (forcing change minus imbalance). [This is an EBM assumption].
ECS is greater than TCR when the imbalance is positive. Do you get this much so far? Do you agree that the imbalance must be positive? This is part 1.

No. Those are not the widely used and recognised definitions of ECS and TCR. Try again, and provide a link to your sources.

This is what Wikipedia says (citing IPCC)

The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) refers to the equilibrium change in global mean near-surface air temperature that would result from a sustained doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) carbon dioxide concentration.

A measure requiring shorter integrations is the transient climate response (TCR) which is defined as the average temperature response over a twenty-year period centered at CO2 doubling in a transient simulation with CO2increasing at 1% per year (compounded), i.e., 60 – 80 years following initiation of the increase in CO2. The transient response is lower than the equilibrium sensitivity because the deep ocean, which takes many centuries after a perturbation to reach a new steady state, continues to serve as a sink for heat from the upper ocean.

We have now established that the imbalance is positive in Lewis and Curry’s paper basically by referring to Table 2, and its ramifications for ECS realtive to TCR from reading equations (4) and (5). We could have saved a lot of time if you looked at Lewis and Curry in the first place. Part 2 will also make reference to their paper’s Table 1.

I asked you to look at Tables 1 and 2 and equations (4) and (5) in Lewis and Curry. This started with Lewis and Curry and now you see that ECS>TCR is due to a positive imbalance, and that a positive imbalance means >100% attribution. Which part did you not understand?

You seem to be trying to swerve off the topic. I go by Lewis and Curry’s equations (4) and (5). If you disagree with their definitions, say so and why. I started with Lewis and Curry and prefer not to change the subject.

Yes, if ECS is less than TCR, we have overshot the anthropogenically forced warming and there would have been other causes to explain that. If ECS is greater than TCR, we have not kept up with the forced warming, so the anthropogenic forcing explains it all and more in the pipeline.

A lot of that got deleted and this may well be deleted again. Anyway, ECS>TCR means anthropogenically forced warming is still going to be greater than all the warming we have had so far, so yes, that means >100% attribution. ECS is the warming to expect from a given forcing and TCR is the instantaneous amount when that forcing levelis reached. If that given forcing is the current value, TCR is determined from the current temperature and ECS tells you how much more to go even if the forcing change stopped now. That is, if the forcing stopped at the current value, we would still warm because the equilibrium is already higher than the current temperature.

Rises in GHGs are not always anthropogenic, but the current one is. Any rise in GHGs causes a forcing change. Given long enough the transient response converges to equilibrium. The response only has transient values while or soon after the forcing changes, and the more rapid the change, the more it lags the equilibrium. My guess is that the PETM change was slow enough that ECS did not exceed TCR by much.

OK, you misunderstood because my statement only referred to the current climate change, the topic under discussion when I kept mentioning Lewis and Curry, so those GHGs are also attributed to man. Cleared that up at last.

As far as I understood and remember it the Lewis and Curry paper was based on the premise that all warming can be attributed to C02 and then let’s see what the ECS or TCS might be based on empirical data.
The issue of endogenous system variability discussed in this presentation simply wasn’t the topic.

I think this is right, 100% anthropogenic warming was a starting assumption for L&C’s analysis, not a result. It’s not an attribution paper.

That said I don’t see how Dr Curry can reconcile the notion that natural contributions are large and significantly unknown with the rather specific central attribution estimate of 50% natural / 50% anthropogenic. Also the “‘More than half’ is not very precise” statement in reference to the IPCC report in light of figure 10.5 showing error bounds and cited source references suggests politicking.

They showed that with their own parameters for aerosols and choice of endpoints, it takes very little sensitivity to account for 100% of the warming, and much of it is other anthropogenic GHGs too. Their endpoints were specifically chosen so that they could rule out any net contributions volcanic and natural internal variations.

“Deterministic Non Periodic Flow”.
The conclusions are that long term climate prediction is impossible.

Either the differential equations of climate models are periodic, non periodic, deterministic or non deterministic. He did not address feedback in the original paper but did in a revision.

If the climate is periodic and deterministic, then prior instances of CO2 forcings > 400 ppm would exist if the feedback were positive and life as we know it would not exist. If CO2 feedbacks are negative, then the system is stable and life as we know it actually does exist.

If the climate is a non periodic system and not deterministic, then it really doesn’t matter what anyone thinks or says, because the system is unpredictable and hence, chaotic.

“The conclusions are that long term climate prediction is impossible.”
No. The conclusion is that very long term weather prediction is impossible. We knew that. The climate analogue is in fact the butterfly, and that is perfectly predictable. And more to the point, you can predict how it will change if the parameters change, which is the analogue of adding more CO₂. In fact, there is a gadget here which lets you do just that, and visualise the result in 3D (WebGL).

Because energy balance is probably mostly a matter of radiance, and not dynamics, global mean temperature is probably predictable.
But no one I know cares about what the mean local temperature is, so I’m not sure mean temperature is at all actionable intelligence.

Fluid flow has multiple components, including unpredictable components: for any given temperature gradient ( not global mean, which is mostly irrelevant to motion ), there remains an infinite number of equally valid solutions to the equations of motion.

But there are also predictable components: the rotation of earth and orbits which largely determine the temperature gradient, the location and orientation of the oceans and mountains. The predictability that air masses encountering the Namibian highlands from Antarctica will remain divergent explains why the Namibian desert has been in place for sixty million years, even through orbits and gradients have changed greatly.

If one goes back to the predictions of Manabe’s early models, which more complex GCMs haven’t really changed much, the predictions of:

Nick ==> You know perfectly well that the unpredictability of weather and climate both is in the details — Lorenz knew that, you know that, I know that.
Saying “The climate analogue is in fact the butterfly, and that is perfectly predictable.” is specious as it in reality says nothing more than “There will be a climate — of some kind — in the future — it will be a lot like the climates of the past and present — but we can’t know the details.”
In the real world, we understand almost nothing about the non-linear functions of the Earth climate — and certainly nothing about what the attractors are. We do know that Lorenz’s butterfly attractor is not a representation of the Earth climate (or weather) — it is produced by Lorenz’s toy model of simple two-dimensional weather. It is what caused Lorenz to realize that if his toy model was “chaotic” (highly non-linear and dependent on initial conditions), leading to his realization that the Real World Weather System, comprising many coupled non-linearities, is more so, thus long-term weather prediction is not possible.
Climate, the composite long-term weather, then can not be predicted by numerical models either because the weather at differing points in space and long-term-time can not be predicted — thus we can not arrive at a long-term future composite that represents future climate.
It is the impossibility of prediction by numerical models that is the point.
We can, of course, predict the seasons and through observational methods, using know relationships between long term cyclic patterns (AMO, PDO, El Nino, etc) make reasonable mid-term predictions.
50-100years — nah.

A balloon tied to a fan is chaotic. Turn the fan at a different angle and the balloon will still be chaotic. There is not way to calculate the position of the balloon after a few seconds.

But I will tell you the general direction the balloon shifted. Weather cannot be accurately predicted in 10 years, but if the earth were to have more or less of a primary forcing we could, of course, tell you something about the changes that will occur.

Anomaly correlation indicates forecasts start becoming “useful” above 60%. So the 10 day forecast is still in the “useless” category.

And this is the 500mb height anomaly, the most simple parameter, probably reflecting the long wave, but not the short wave variation. While long wave pattern can be very useful, It is the “short waves” that create the most significant features, namely storms and precipitation.

Well this issue of predictability was not really settled by Lorenz. There is an attractor and so it is possible the attractor is strong enough that the outcome is deterministic at least in statistical averages. It’s also possible its not attractive enough and the climate is not predictable.

Computability is another issue. Even if climate is predictable, computing that outcome might be impossible due to numerical errors and the impossibility of using classical numerical error control.

I with people would get this issue right. Bumper sticker slogans are always inaccurate.

1. There is no consensus on the validity of the AGW conjecture. Scientists never registered and voted on the matter. But even if they had, science is not a democracy, The laws of science are not some form of legislation. Scientific theories are not validated via a voting process. So such a consensus, if it existed would be meaningless.

2. Radiametric calculations, performed decades ago, came up with a value of 1.2 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 without regard to any feedback effects. Kyoji Kimoto has pointed out that this calculation ignores the fact that a doubling of CO2 would cause a slight decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere which is a cooling effect. This cooling effect reduces the climate sensitivity of CO2 by more than a factor of 20 yielding a climate sensitivity of CO2 of less than .06 degrees C which is a trivial amount.

3. According to the AGW conjecture, CO2 based warming will cause more H2O to enter the atmosphere which in turn causes more warming because H2O is a greenhouse gas, with LWIR absorption bands. For those that believe in the radiametric greenhouse effect, molecule per molecule, H2O is a stronger absorber of IR than is CO2 and because there is so much more H2O in the Earth’s atmosphere then is CO2, H2O is by far the primary greenhouse gas. What the AGW conjecture completely ignores is that besides being a greenhouse gas, H2O is a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface, which is mostly some form of H2O, to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. According to some models, more heat energy is moved by H2O via the heat of vaporization then by both convection and LWIR absorption band radiation combined. The net cooling effect of H2O is evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate in the troposphere, Instead of providing a positive feedback and alplifying the warming effect of CO2, H2O provides a negative feedback which diminishes any warming effect ath CO2 might have. Some like to assume that the amplification of CO2 based warming by H2O is a factor of 3 whereby a more realistic amplification factor would be 1/3, yielding a climate sensitivity of CO2 of less than .02 degrees C which is an even more trivial amount.

4 The AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect caused by trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with LWIR absorption bands. A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the heat trapping action of so called greenhouse gases. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. It is really a convective and not a radiative greenhouse effect that keeps a real greenhouse warm. So too on Earth where gravity limits cooling by convection. The Earth’s convective greenhouse effect is a function of the heat capacity of the atmosphere, the height of the troposphere and gravity. As derived from first principals, the Earth’s convective greenhouse effect keeps the surface of the Earth on average 33 degrees C warmer than it would be otherwise. 33 degrees C is the amount derived from first principals and 33 degrees C is the amount that has been measured. Additional warming from a radiant greenhouse effect has not been detected. A radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, in the Earth’s climate system, or anywhere else in the solar system for that matter. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction..

5. Based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is effectively zero. There are many good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them. .

Not a conjecture, evidence in support of a theory that predicts this to happen. Just using these 60 years of observations, the effective transient rate is fairly sharp around 2.3 C per doubling because these lines have not wandered far from each other. This indicates a robust positive feedback over the whole period.

I think your presentation is very logical and 98% easily understood. I think the most effective parts were these:

“Policy cart before scientific horse

showing Hansen sea level rise

You find what you shine a light on

Is CO2 the control knob for global sea level rise?

The scientific evidence that I’ve shown you on the preceding slides is well known to the IPCC. quoting from IPCC 5

Madhouse effect. [really nice phrase I hadn’t seen before]”

If during the debate you gave several recent examples of “climate shifts [ing] naturally in unexpected ways”, I think that would be very important and highly effective. If the climate shifts unexpectedly, we are at risk of cooling, for which CO2 could be a welcome addition.

One little quibble I have is the use of the term “nonlinear”, which undoubtedly is scientifically accurate. I suspect that it is highly important and I would have given a little more explanation of it in your presentation. (On the other hand, I realize that you wanted to keep your presentation simple)

Overall. Thank you for a very good job that others will be able to rely upon for a very long time.

Excellent presentation. I do notice there’s still a reluctance to deal with the fact that most of the alarmism is associated with CO2 concentrations and temperatures from RCP8.5, which is clearly a non sense “business as usual” case.

The format and moderation of this were very well done. There was a lot packed into 90 minutes.

Mann was on his ‘best’ behavior, didn’t use the word denier once (used contrarian). His 15 minute presentation was surprisingly ineffective. He tried to cram way too much into 15 minutes, didn’t make any single strong points. He used ‘uncertainty is not your friend’ many many times.

Titley’s presentation was very well crafted and very well presented, but loaded with ‘whoppers.’

The more interesting part was that we were each asked two questions and had two minutes to respond to each. Mann was thrown a softball ‘defend the hockey stick’. I got a decision making under uncertainty one plus an ECS question.

The only sort of fireworks were in the closing statements, we each had two minutes. Mann hit hard with contrarian nonsense, and if you want the ‘truth’, go to skeptical science.com. I countered with ‘you have just seen the climate science madhouse in action’

” I countered with ‘you have just seen the climate science madhouse in action’” I thought that was great actually. Sound was so appallingly poor. For some reason your voice came through loud and clear when you spoke. I didn’t hear much and couldn’t really here who said what but someone said “If you tried presenting 20 year old graphs like that at any reputable conference you’d be laughed into the hallway.” (I think that is what I heard.) I am wondering who said that and to whom were they referring.

Dr Curry, you believe that changes in large-scale ocean circulation and cloudiness are the key drivers of climate change ( and not CO2 or other kinds of anthropogenic forcing).
As far as I know there is no observational evidence supporting your view. The cloudiness has seemingly increased slightly through the period of global warming according to ICOADS (sea) and CRU TS (land), which should have a cooling effect.
Also, there is decent data on OHC since 1955 and it doesn’t look like the deep oceans have released (lost) heat to warm the surface and atmosphere. On the contrary, the OHC has increased more or less continuosly, in line with the energy imbalance suggested by models..

The Pacific is the source of most global cloud change (Clements et al 2009).

And it changes at decadal to millennial scales in deterministic chaotic shifts in patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation.

This shows the cloud radiative effect following the 1976/77 climate shift. Warming in shortwave and cooling in infrared.

“In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.” IPCC AR4 s2.4.4.1

And it is consistent with ocean heat uptake – when there was finally sufficient data density to average ocean heat readings annually – instead of 5 years. Even then readings at depth are almost nonexistent.

The reality is undeniably evident in 21st century data. But I’m sure they will find a way. The IPCC failed to follow the evidence. So perhaps they can just wave it away as usual. Lots of skeptics are science deniers but all of these self-appointed climate acolytes are.

Robert I Ellison.
You seem to use a weird definition of “straw man”, which includes connecting Dr Curry’s “My personal assessment aligns with the right-hand side” with key climate drivers mentioned in the right hand side.

Also, I’m not writing about regional variations in cloud cover etc., like the stuff you show. My focus is on global warming since 1950, where IPCC says the best estimate of the anthropogenic contribution is 110%, whereas Dr Currys says 50% and makes up a mysterious energy source out of the blue that warms the planet.

Global warming, changes in global forcing and energy imbalance, and the possibility of global internal redistribution of heat..

I made this little strip so you can follow my reasoning on global warming (and not regional variability):

“1.
an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent’s real argument.
“her familiar procedure of creating a straw man by exaggerating their approach”
2.
a person regarded as having no substance or integrity.
“a photogenic straw man gets inserted into office and advisers dictate policy”

Seems about right. You might note that – inter alia – I quoted the IPCC.

Why don’t you actually calculate the correlation between CO2 and surface temp over the 20th century?

We are finding surprising indrect solar effects.
The large variability in the energy dynamic of the planet emerges from dynamical changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation that are solar modulated.

Your cloud is inconsistent with ISCCP and ERBE data last century and CERES this.

Proposed solar relations do not act on short time scales. Low cloud, over ocean not easily observed. Atmospheric temp change over 11yr half of cycle is ~.1c. Ocean tide gauges suggest a significantly higher heat flux into the ocean.

Past century GAT changes also coincided with much larger changes in glaciers. Latent heat implies temp change would have been much higher if there was less ice, as there is now. The albedo change was much greater than today because of the higher latitudes of glaciers and reduced ice mass today (less snow and ice to absorb and change sensible to latent heat, energy reflected at lower latitudes much great than at the higher lat where ice is today).

Olof R | June 13, 2018 at 7:01 am | Reply
“Also, there is decent data on OHC since 1955”
No, not true, a few buckets thrown over ships on a couple of sea routes better recorded is all. ARGO was the big step forward much later and still does not give widespread frequent cover and virtually nil below 2000 meters. OHC is the best assessment if we could assess it, which we cannot.
Full stop.
“and it doesn’t look like the deep oceans have released (lost) heat to warm the surface and atmosphere.”
Why is that do you think? Did the oceans stop working? There is a scientific theory that hot should flow to cold so technically the sea should release said heat.
“On the contrary, the OHC has increased more or less continuously in line with the energy imbalance suggested by models.”
They would be funny models if they showed OHC dropping when it was going up.

Angech, you are uninformed, OHC is not measured with buckets in shipping lanes, historically it is measured by oceanographic research vessels using XBT, MBT, etc.
Before 1955 we know virtually nothing about OHC (which doesn’t stop Lewis&Curry from making wild guesses about OHC change in the 1870ies when estimating ECS). After 1955 there is at least decent pentadal data on OHC making it possible to follow long term changes.
We know little about ocean warming below 2000 m, but the few data that exists (and models) suggests that the deep ocean warming is about 10-15 % of the total ocean warming.
If we assume that no external forcing warms the oceans they may still warm the atmosphere by releasing heat. Like in the 2016 el Nino when the 0-2000 m OHC dropped by 1.6*10^22 J between 2015 and 2016 (data from NOAA/NODC). But thats short-term variability, in the long run oceans only warm because of the forced energy imbalance.
Its a safe bet that the pentadal OHC only will go up as long as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to increase and no major volcanic event happens.

Do we now have reliable data – rather than the <10% coverage and pentadal averages of last centuries ocean heat and much revised radiative flux?

What I find intriguing is the steady increase – with the annual cycles – in cumulative energy in less energy out. This is an apparent discrepancy between ocean heat and cumulative radiant imbalances early in the record that is a mystery. I’d suggest that there is a problem with the early Argo record – and that the planet has been warming – for multiple reasons that are not anthropogenic
– this century.

On the left hand side is the perspective of a stable climate that changes in response to changes in atmospheric CO2…

However some scientists think that this is a misleading oversimplification. They regard climate as a complex nonlinear dynamical system, with no simple cause and effect. Climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways, owing to natural internal variability associated with large-scale ocean circulations.

Proponents of the CO2 as control knob idea acknowledge the existence natural variability but dismiss it as noise that averages out. Proponents of the natural variability arguments acknowledge the impact of CO2, but consider it to be a modest wedge that projects onto the natural modes of climate variability.

As a cartoon reflection this seems generally reasonable. Your own work puts you on the left side since the results of Lewis and Curry (2014, 2018) are dependent on climate following an extremely predictable linear response to forcing.

However, there seems to be an unstated incorrect assumption embedded here that a non-linear dynamic perspective has to mean smaller CO2 effect. In reality a non-linear response to CO2 could equally mean a much greater response than suggested by a linearised perspective.

——————————-

5 Disagreement: cause of climate change

So does this rather arcane scientific debate actually matter? Well, yes it does.

If you assume that carbon dioxide is the control knob for climate, than you can control climate by reducing CO2 emissions.

No, that’s not a valid representation. We already are controlling climate. The goal of reducing CO2 emissions is to reduce our influence on climate.

If you assume that climate change primarily occurs naturally, then the Earth’s climate is largely uncontrollable, and reducing CO2 emissions will do little or nothing to change the climate.

It’s not clear what ‘climate change primarily occurs naturally’ means here. Obviously over the course of Earth’s history climate change has occurred naturally, but that doesn’t mean anything about the cause of change over the past century of substantial human modification of the climate-relevant atmosphere. If we’re assuming a climate system dominated by non-linear dynamics then it is not at all correct to claim knowledge that preventing further growth in CO2 concentration would make no difference compared to allowing CO2 to go up to 1000ppm (for example). Anyone truly adhering to a dynamic non-linear climate perspective would have to say they have no idea what the consequences would be, but they could be world changing.

It seems to me that ultimately the initial presentation in terms of linear vs. non-linear was a bit of red herring. As it turned out this is essentially a simple matter of estimating the potential size of GMST internal variability (which can be done equally well with either perspective) + an apparent (evidence-free) assumption that internal variability must be positive over the past Century, or since 1950. In reality if the typical magnitude of internal variability can easily produce > 0.3ºC warming over 60 years, it could equally have caused >0.3ºC cooling, and therefore a stronger anthropogenic warming.

————————————-

6 Policy cart before scientific horse

The 1992 UN Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible human influence on global climate.

This badly misrepresents the situation. Attribution is simply one aspect of climate science which typically applies statistical methods in order to explain some aspects of past climate variability. The overall science on climate change is much more than that and there was a clear consensus by 1990 that humans were causing an enhanced greenhouse effect which would result in warming. Attribution would be ideal, but was not necessary given the strength of basic physical understanding.

Paul, You say its simply a matter of quantifying internal variability. And of course that’s the problem. Even Dessler admitted that there are no good methods for doing this separation of forced response from “internal variability.” Perhaps that’s because the conceptual separation is not a useful theory, and yes its a theory.

Yes, I don’t mean to suggest that estimating internal variability is necessarily simple. Just that what the presentation was really talking about can be framed much more simply as “differing assumptions about potential internal variability magnitude”.

“there was a clear consensus by 1990 that humans were causing an enhanced greenhouse effect which would result in warming”

Except (as the excerpt states) it was believed to be about the same as natural variability. That’s obviously quite a lot different than what we hear today.

“Attribution would be ideal, but was not necessary given the strength of basic physical understanding.”

The “basic physical understanding” of direct CO2 warming didn’t result in very much warming, though. It’s only with the addition of indirect feedbacks (which are still not well understood, hence the ECS spread in the literature) that CO2 has serious policy implications.

No, what the text states is that the warming to date (about 0.5ºC) was believed to be possibly about the same size as estimates of potential internal variability. Since then we’ve seen another 0.5ºC warming, hence total warming is now clearly greater than that estimate of internal variability. We also have better constrained estimates of internal variability from improvements in proxy reconstructions .

Of course in 1990 they meant the warming to date, they could hardly attribute or compare warming that hadn’t happened yet to anything. But by 2001, they were expressing “strong evidence” attributing “most” of the 1951-2001 warming to human sources.

And again, the evolving strength of that claim was based on poorly understood feedbacks, not well-understood basic physics.

“We also have better constrained estimates of internal variability from improvements in proxy reconstructions .”

But again, that kind of analysis is only meaningful if climate is not “a complex nonlinear dynamical system, with no simple cause and effect.” If the constraints are fundamentally unknowable within relevant ranges, those analyses are unlikely to provide useful policy guidance, and indeed may tend to induce overconfidence.

I think that the recent Lewis and Curry paper assumed the correctness of IPCC forcings – without much in the way of internal variability – as an alternative to the chaotic vagaries climate models. If you understood the Slingo and Palmer reference – you too might understand model vagaries. I’m not convinced that the very idea of ECS is meaningful either way.

Ghil’s 1-D climate model shows that climate sensitivity (γ) is variable. It is the change in temperature (ΔT) divided by the change in the control variable (Δμ) – the tangent to the curve as shown above. Sensitivity increases moving down the upper curve to the left towards the bifurcation and becomes arbitrarily large at the instability. The problem in a chaotic climate then becomes not one of quantifying climate sensitivity in a smoothly evolving climate but of predicting the onset of abrupt climate shifts and their implications for climate and society. The problem of abrupt climate change on multi-decadal scales is of the most immediate significance.

But the wedge is very real and inserted under a real magnetic oscillator – alluding to the risk of abrupt and perhaps catastrophic climate change in a chaotic Earth System. Starting at about the 7 minute mark.

On climate I am inclined to think that most 20th century warming was quite natural. Anthropogenic warming in the post – war period was some 0.4 degrees K. 1944 and 1998 being the peaks of 2 successive 20 to 30 year Pacific Ocean regimes – as seen in surface temperature records. With a dimming sun and associated resurgent upwelling in the eastern Pacific suggesting a cooling influence this century. Starting perhaps with the next Pacific climate shift due in a 2018 to 2028 window. If you have not heard of this – I guess it will come as a surprise.

Where did you get maybe from? What do you think random looks like? Perhaps seemingly random might help you but I doubt it.

“The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.” Slingo and Palmer

Nitpicking a schematic seems your usual speed. The third – real – concept shows a change in mean and variance. But you do understand that this is not data – just 3 conceptualizations of underlying climate modes?

I routinely find your comments to be bizarrely off target. What the schematic says is not 1 or 2 but 3 is real. Now if you want to argue that the stable equilibrium or purely periodic ideas are correct knock yourself out.

” In reality if the typical magnitude of internal variability can easily produce > 0.3ºC warming over 60 years, it could equally have caused >0.3ºC cooling, and therefore a stronger anthropogenic warming.”

Sure, but that doesn’t really help your argument — the more cooling is attributable to natural variability, the more beneficial CO2 emissions have been, and may continue to be. The 1970s cooling scare was not spurious, even if most official statements about it turned out to be wrong — the consequences of a return to the conditions at the last glacial maximum makes even the most lurid warming scenarios seem picayune by comparison.

paulskio: In reality a non-linear response to CO2 could equally mean a much greater response than suggested by a linearised perspective.

I agree with that. As far as I can tell from my readings, including the posts and articles from Robert I Ellison here, asserting that the climate dynamics are well-approximated by some as yet unknown dynamical system tells us nothing about whether CO2 increase has made a difference to date or will make a difference in the future. It enlarges the space of possibilities for us to think about.

paulski0
“In reality if the typical magnitude of internal variability can easily produce > 0.3ºC warming over 60 years, it could equally have caused >0.3ºC cooling, and therefore a stronger anthropogenic warming.”
So close to reasonableness yet chucks in this subterfuge.
What would you say to
“In reality if the typical magnitude of internal variability can easily produce > 1.3ºC warming over 60 years, it could equally have caused >1.3ºC cooling, and therefore excludes anthropogenic warming.”
Before the whinge about being unrealistic I point out 2 small facts, take them as you will
One, you do not know what the level of natural variability is, no one does, so I could be right. Accept that point.
Two, a couple of examples.
The combined total sea ice are fell a couple of years ago by 5 standard deviations. 5 or more count them. Secondly 4 or 5 years ago only the value was at the highest for that month ever and Antarctic ice only was over 2 standard deviations above normal. Facts.
What should this tell you?
If you were prepared to listen and think, you would say, how are these facts possible in a world that has limited natural variation.
The conclusion is that the facts are real. Natural variability is a lot greater than you think and while CO2 might play an important role in future warming we cannot judge it on the limited evidence we have to date.

What would you say to
“In reality if the typical magnitude of internal variability can easily produce > 1.3ºC warming over 60 years, it could equally have caused >1.3ºC cooling, and therefore excludes anthropogenic warming.”

I would say that it’s plainly false. Internal variability of that magnitude would mean an anthropogenic contribution range of about -0.6 to 2.0ºC, which includes a potentially extremely strong anthropogenic warming.

One, you do not know what the level of natural variability is, no one does, so I could be right. Accept that point.

Depends what you mean by “know”. We have multi-millennial late Holocene proxy reconstructions that show no evidence for unforced variations even close to that kind of magnitude. Therefore it is entirely correct to place an extremely low probability on such an occurrence in a given 60-year period.

paulski0 | June 19, 2018 at 10:54 am |
I said ” you do not know what the level of natural variability is, no one does, so I could be right. Accept that point.”‘
Depends what you mean by “know”. We have multi-millennial late “Holocene proxy reconstructions that show no evidence for unforced variations even close to that kind of magnitude. Therefore it is entirely correct to place an extremely low probability on such an occurrence in a given 60-year period”
–
That is not an argument. As we both know variations of several degrees over a 60 year period could remain almost hidden in data in the early part of the holocene. Data from 11,000 years ago is not yearly tree rings but multi decadal changes which hide the true extent of the range of the variation.
If you go back millions of years such changes would of course be completely unobservable.
If you take a simple 5 years of obs, say over the wax and wane of the last El Nino you would find a temperature change due to natural variation of nearly 2 C in 2 years.

consider the global sea ice area in September 2014 when it was extremely high yet 3 years later extremely low No CO2 change of consequence One natural big El Nino and you go from one internal variability extreme to another. The called 5-7 standard deviations.
Obviously wrong. If the deviations can be so big so quickly they did not work out the real possible internal variability correctly in the first place.
Did they.

Dr. Curry ==> Brilliant presentation — and I approve of dropping the slide about Chaos and Climate — even the more educated here do not understand the issue and find it confusing — despite the fact that non-linear chaos is why climate models can’t predict long-term climate.

I cannot imagine what he means by this and would love to know. Believing a false forecast is usually worse than believing none, because you prepare for what does not happen and do not prepare for what does happen. Recognizing uncertainty is very important and useful, hence friendly.

My guess is Dr. Mann always expects the uncertainty to result in a worse than expected situation. Never a better than expected situation. Dr. Mann only looks at one side of the probability distribution – the high end.

Oh, I see now. Warmers and skeptics tend to use the word “uncertainty” in two different senses, each defined by their beliefs. This creates what Kuhn called “talking past” one another, a common characteristic of discourse between proponents of competing paradigms.

Warmers mean it could be worse than we think, while skeptics mean there may be no problem at all. Of course Mann is using the warmer’s meaning. In the warmer’s sense uncertainty does not justify inaction, but in the skeptics sense it does. Thus these are two fundamentally different meanings for the same word.

As Kuhn put it, two different languages are being spoken using the same words! No wonder there is confusion. (Disclosure: I did my Ph.D. thesis on this pesky aspect of scientific reasoning.)

I think skeptics don’t see the ghg affect as appreciably increasing uncertainty, ie that alarmists ignore the inherent uncertainty. Alarmists also ignore the uncertainty in regard to policy, both in the goal of reducing forcing and the effects those policies will have on society, such as the impact of more expensive energy, misallocation of resources (waste of CCS, use of natural gas for baseload), reduced food production/security, likely stabilizing effect of greenhouse gasses, distraction from toxic pollution…

“Indeed, we have historically tended to underestimate the rate of climate change impacts. We reviewed the evidence in Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, showing that many aspects of climate change — e.g. the melting of Arctic sea ice and the ice sheets, and the rise in sea level — have proceeded faster than the models had predicted on average. Uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to the prospects for dangerous climate change.”

Sure, if you ignore the predictions of hundreds of millions of people starving to death in the 1960s, or the “global cooling” predictions of the 1970s, or the lurid claims about acid raid in the 1980s… Ron Bailey filled an entire book with failed prophecies of doom. And as the 1970s episode shows, sometimes uncertainty turns out to mean you didn’t even have the sign right — it’s possible the bulk of current climate action is actually harmful.

Whether greater uncertainty increases the urgency for ‘action’ depends on the proposition the uncertainty is of. If it becomes increasingly uncertain that CO2 is a climate control knob then the reason to reduce CO2 emissions diminishes accordingly. There is much confusion in the loose talk about uncertainty that does not say of what.

The future of climate is utterly uncertain but by it’s essential dynamic, complex nature the CO2 wedge could bring large and adverse climate shifts. This low probability and high consequence event is in a risk management framework an extreme risk. We are changing the composition of the atmosphere with an ignorance of outcomes. Taking s step in the dark.

People are confident in tales of inevitable outcomes – whether high impact or no impact. They are equally wrong.

Proponents of the natural variability arguments acknowledge the impact of CO2, but consider it to be a modest wedge that projects onto the natural modes of climate variability.

…and, that it follows global warming.

Earth’s geophysical history tells us our current atmosphere is CO2-starved and that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels are not related to global warming or cooling on any time scale. The examination of ice core data tells us that increases in atmospheric CO2 cannot be the cause of global warming because it follows global warming by hundreds of years.

Someone posted this comment to the climate change subreddit and I’ll cut and paste the response I posted there. I’m obviously not a big fan.
***********

In slide # 13, Dr. Curry takes issue with the IPCC consensus that human emissions are extremely likely to be causing the majority of warming. Her gut tells her that it’s a 50/50 proposition. She is not saying that the consensus is wrong, only that the certainty of the consensus doesn’t feel right to her.

I would argue that in the face of uncertainty, we should look to the Hippocratic Oath as a source of moral guidance on how to proceed. First do no harm. Dr. Curry seems to be arguing that we should behave as if climate change is not significantly harmful and that the “cure” (emission reductions) would be “worse than the disease” (effects of climate change.

Potential emission reductions come in a lot of different forms. There is a big difference between asking someone to forego energy for cooking and heating vs. reducing overseas travel or Humvee sales. When you are considering the possibility of a significant reduction in quality of life for future generations, the onus should be on the present generation to cut back on unnecessary luxuries.

In the absence of certainty, there isn’t any good case for not taking a conservative approach.

Curry devotes a lot of her slides (5) to sea level rise (SLR). I have a lot of issues with her presentation there.

1) In slide #9, the chart seems to represent a SLR decline from 2000 to the end and the length of that length appears to represent something close to 10 years. I look at NASA’s site as the official record and the no such lengthy flattening exists. She’s using a chart (not of her making) which misrepresents what is going on.

2) A bullet point on slide 9 indicates that the ramp up of CO2 emissions from 1950-1980 is not accompanied by a significant increase in the rate of SLR. She doesn’t point out that there is an expected lag period in ocean warming and expansion as it takes quite a few years for ocean to reach equibrium to the greenhouse forcing.

3) At the end of slide 9 she implies that she is going to explain why sea level is rising in the following slide. What she does do is provide an inventory of sources of sea level rise. She doesn’t offer an explanation of the root cause.

4) I’m not exactly sure what the measurement is in slide 10. Perhaps it’s a 10 or 20 year rolling average of SLR. It’s misleading becausing there is a great deal of year to year volatility in the number. Also, the max value in the slide is ~ 3.3mm/yr and in this decade, the average has been about 4.4mm/yr with 2 years exceeding 10mm.

5) In slide 9, Curry acknowledges that rate of SLR has increased since 1993. Good for her ! Some of her followers are reluctant to acknowledge that.

6) In Slide 11, Curry employs a slide which shows Greenland ice / mass change dating back to 1900. I’m not sure how they could have gotten reliable measurements of this in the pre-satellite era (before 1993).

7) Curry’s slides complete ignore the state of the art in SLR research related to Marine Ice Sheet Instability which has come to the forefront in the last 5 years. Changes in wind and ocean circulation are allowing more warm water to come into contact with glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica and accelerating melt. In areas where the glaciers sit below sea level on retrograde beds, the melting will continue accelerating until new grounding lines are reached or until the warm water recedes.

For a good understanding of the change in global wind circulations due to climate change, I recommend perusing the work of Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University.

For expertise on SLR in general, I recommend the work of Eric Rignot of NASA and UC Irvine or the seminal work on Marine Ice Sheet Instability by Deconto and Pollard in 2014.

Rich Kleinman: In the absence of certainty, there isn’t any good case for not taking a conservative approach.

What is a “conservative” approach? With or without global warming, California, Texas, China, the Indus Valley, and many other places will continue to experience alternations of drought and flooding. California is not prepared for its past, not to mention the possibility of future extremes, and is letting its present water works decay, yet is investing heavily in projects aimed to reduce CO2 production. Is that “conservative”? If there is an AGW threat to crops, isn’t the “conservative” approach to maintain or increase the crop-breeding programs that are in place and have been successful to date?

This has been much discussed. We oughtn’t act as though AGW is the only serious threat, or as though CO2 reduction is the only serious action. I ask a simpler question: What, in your mind, is “conservative”?

Wow – long winded and typically superior and supercilious. i always find it astonishing that climate acolytes imagine that their simple narratives gives them the right to hector and condescend to scientists.

1) “… She’s using a chart (not of her making) which misrepresents what is going on.”

The source is given but we’re just going to ignore that and rattle something off from the top of our heads.

2) “… She doesn’t point out that there is an expected lag period in ocean warming and expansion as it takes quite a few years for ocean to reach equibrium to the greenhouse forcing.”

Even in the thermal inertia scenario – the rate of heat uptake is exponentially reducing over time. But data suggests that the whole idea is a myth derived from simple and misguided estimates of ‘eddy diffusion’.

Power flux imbalances are obtained with the simple expedient of assuming CERES is about right and adding it incoming solar less outgoing energy.

The result is a very large annual variation. Annual variability has significant implications for ocean heat change. Ocean heat does not change slowly as a result of greenhouse gases and thermal inertia but warms and cools rapidly in response to the very large annual signal.

4) I’m not exactly sure what the measurement is in slide 10. Perhaps it’s a 10 or 20 year rolling average of SLR. It’s misleading becausing there is a great deal of year to year volatility in the number. Also, the max value in the slide is ~ 3.3mm/yr and in this decade, the average has been about 4.4mm/yr with 2 years exceeding 10mm.

5) In slide 9, Curry acknowledges that rate of SLR has increased since 1993. Good for her ! Some of her followers are reluctant to acknowledge that.

6) In Slide 11, Curry employs a slide which shows Greenland ice / mass change dating back to 1900. I’m not sure how they could have gotten reliable measurements of this in the pre-satellite era (before 1993).

7) Curry’s slides complete ignore the state of the art in SLR research related to Marine Ice Sheet Instability which has come to the forefront in the last 5 years. Changes in wind and ocean circulation are allowing more warm water to come into contact with glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica and accelerating melt. In areas where the glaciers sit below sea level on retrograde beds, the melting will continue accelerating until new grounding lines are reached or until the warm water recedes.

“It’s misleading becausing there is a great deal of year to year volatility in the number. Also, the max value in the slide is ~ 3.3mm/yr and in this decade, the average has been about 4.4mm/yr with 2 years exceeding 10mm.”

So year to year variability and imaging that the trend this decade is reliable?

“5) In slide 9, Curry acknowledges that rate of SLR has increased since 1993. Good for her ! Some of her followers are reluctant to acknowledge that.”

Mostly we find the ‘acceleration’ underwhelming and que

6) In Slide 11, Curry employs a slide which shows Greenland ice / mass change dating back to 1900. I’m not sure how they could have gotten reliable measurements of this in the pre-satellite era (before 1993).

7) Curry’s slides complete ignore the state of the art in SLR research related to Marine Ice Sheet Instability which has come to the forefront in the last 5 years. Changes in wind and ocean circulation are allowing more warm water to come into contact with glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica and accelerating melt. In areas where the glaciers sit below sea level on retrograde beds, the melting will continue accelerating until new grounding lines are reached or until the warm water recedes.

“6) In Slide 11, Curry employs a slide which shows Greenland ice / mass change dating back to 1900. I’m not sure how they could have gotten reliable measurements of this in the pre-satellite era (before 1993).”

But believe me we are going to deny confounding science without reading it based on handwaving claims about data adequacy.

“7) Curry’s slides complete ignore the state of the art in SLR research related to Marine Ice.”

The problem with knowing a few simple things about the Earth system is that there is always a dynamic, deterministic chaotic planet of unknowns out there.

The problem with chaos is catastrophe – in the sense of Rene Thom.

Control variables may be intrinsic or anthropogenic – something they always miss.

The centralized economic planning AI overlord will of course ban air travel and Humvees.

I followed your suggestion about Jennifer Francis. She appears an alarmist of the first order. Can you provide a specific link that provides details of her work on global wind circulations?

She seems to have gone back to 1993 but presumably she would not base a theory on such a short time scale.

HH Lamb carried out work on global wind circulations going back centuries and reconstructed North Atlantic wind back to 1550. This shows long periods of settled winds from specific directions, abrupt changes then long settled periods again.

It is difficult to see any noticeable changes when looked at in the scale of centuries, so perhaps you can post a link to the work of Jennifer Francis so we can make a comparison over the centuries. Thank you

Rich, Your hypocratic oath statement is simplistic and not useful. 7 billion humans are going to have effects on the climate, some perhaps large. It’s all about trade offs, just as medicine is about tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are not as simplistic as your moralistic approach and require real and unbiased science. And that’s the problem here I fear. I don’t think climate science is unbiased as Nic Lewis’ work shows. He was easily able to show that the energy balance methods actually gave ECS about half of what the IPCC was claiming.

Kleinman: “I would argue that in the face of uncertainty, we should look to the Hippocratic Oath as a source of moral guidance on how to proceed. First do no harm. ”

This is factually not correct. Limiting CO2 does cause harm in many ways. In a general sense, it raises the cost of living and prevents people from buying other things they may need — such as for instance, healthcare. The UK has an intelligent program of tracking energy poverty deaths (which reduced use of fossil fuels will only make worse). Here is part of Wiki’s summary:

“Although the phenomenon of excess winter deaths is not unique to the United Kingdom, the incidence is markedly higher than for countries with similar climates and living standards. England has an 18% rise in deaths during the winter, on average, whereas Finland has a 10% increase, Germany and the Netherlands have 11%.[7]

Since 2000, excess winter deaths in England and Wales remained generally at around 25,000. For the period of 2007-2008 the number of excess winter deaths was 27,480 of which the Hill reporte estimated that around 10% were caused directly by fuel poverty.[8] The winter of 2008-2009 the coldest in 10 years, and the Office for National Statistics estimated there were a total of 36,700, an increase of 49% over the previous year, which represents a 23.8% rise in deaths during the winter.[9]

Deaths from hypothermia among UK pensioners almost doubled during the 5 years up to 2012, a time when several cold winters combined with largescale increases in energy prices.

The number of pensioners dying from hypothermia has nearly doubled in five years, a period when a succession of cold winters has been coupled with drastic rises in energy bills.[10] Exposure to the cold does affect the number of winter deaths‚ but deaths from other cold related causes are very much more common than it is for the cold to kill people directly. In the main these deaths are from respiratory or cardio-vascular ailments. Overall deaths are from heart attacks‚ strokes‚ bronchial and other conditions‚ and may often occur several days after exposure to the cold. Spending too long in the cold will lower the body temperature which can often aggravate circulatory diseases‚ which can lead to strokes and heart attacks or respiratory illnesses such as bronchitis or pneumonia.”

The global economy is worth about $100 trillion a year. To put aid and philanthropy into perspective – the total is 0.025% of the global economy. If spent on Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals such expenditure can generate a benefit to cost ratio of more than 15. If spent on the UN Sustainable Development Goals you may as well piss it up against a wall. Either way – it is nowhere near the major path to universal prosperity. Some 3.5 billion people make less than $2 a day. Changing that can only be done by doubling and tripling global production – and doing it as quickly as possible. Optimal economic growth is essential and that requires an understanding and implementation of explicit principles for effective economic governance of free markets.

Economically the world is locked into a growth cycle – despite any and all reservations and interventions. A high growth planet brings resources to solve people and environment problems. The clearest way to economic growth is markets – and the biggest risk is market mismanagement.

Poverty alleviation comes with economic growth as an outcome of economic freedom. The basis for all social and environmental progress is economic growth, robust democracies and bottom up – rather than UN down – approaches to global environments. Bottom up ‘polycentric’ approaches rely on the most modern theories and models of human behaviour to recreate the strategies that have worked in the past. As Nobel Prize winner in economic Elinor Ostrom said – it is applying complex and messy human solutions to complex problems of society and the environment.

Economic freedom fuels technological innovation and economic growth provides resources for the “creative destruction” of capitalism and the transition to more modern and efficient productive systems. Cheap energy powers sustained economic growth – and emissions from fossil fuels are not in principle an externalities problem. We can – in theory at least – increase the cost of energy with taxes and caps to achieve energy substitution – something seemingly at odds with poverty alleviation. Or we can decrease the cost of low carbon energy sources through technological innovation. The latter is a better way to go – and the relevant price of an energy transition is thus negative. “The key to solving for both climate and poverty is helping nations build innovative energy systems that can deliver cheap, clean, and reliable power.” Our High Energy Planet – Breakthrough Institute

And, we likely aren’t just addicted to fossil fuels, we are probably also addicted to emissions. Most agriculture is subsistence, and probably dependent on CO2 both for fertilization and to keep water stress down.

Nature is slowly increasing its ability to consume CO2, I don’t think it’s impossible that it outpaces our emissions in the not to distant future. It’s far fetched, but not as far fetched as the greenhouse effect making our weather significantly worse.

Kleinman, I’m an engineer, and I find that scientists require a lot of hand holding, mentoring, and patient handling when we are implementing their ideas, if they involve engineering, project planning, cost estimating, and economics. I have supervised scientists and meteo/oceanography types and they require years before they are ready to serve as team leaders in a project.

And what you propose is a megaproject on steroids. And this path you suggest may cause a lot more harm than doing nothing. On the other hand doing a small amount now and focusing on research, including geoengineering seems to be a no brainer. The optimum may be something in between, especially when we consider the world is running out of oil and in a few decades there will be hell to pay if we aren’t careful and save as much as possible fir future generations.

So you see, from my side of the fence scientists who get into fields they know little about are just as dangerous as a butcher in an operating room. The coin has multiple sides.

The Aviso site he uses warms against short term trendology. I have shown him where. Zilch perspective is just the truth.

His back to back La Nina is another untruth he clings to.

And there may just be enough geopotential energy in the western Pacific for a wimpy little El Nino.

But what it really depends on is the state of the southern annular mode and resultant wind and gyre strength. . Negative modes bias the system to upwelling on the eastern margin and an incipient La Nina. One thing is certain – another big La Nina is certain to emerge – the trick is predicting when.

“2) A bullet point on slide 9 indicates that the ramp up of CO2 emissions from 1950-1980 is not accompanied by a significant increase in the rate of SLR. She doesn’t point out that there is an expected lag period in ocean warming and expansion as it takes quite a few years for ocean to reach equibrium to the greenhouse forcing.”

Assume 92% of the warming has gone into the oceans.

Then explain your quite a few years of lag. The thing can’t going to be there in the future and already be there.

…Our analysis of recent observations shows that the acceleration of ocean thermal expansion during 1993–2014 is not significant. Climate model simulations indicate the fall in ocean heat content following the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo and the subsequent recovery has probably resulted in a rate of thermal expansion about 0.5 mm yr−1 higher than would be expected from greenhouse gas forcing alone28. The recovery in ocean thermal expansion following major volcanic eruption takes more than 15 years28,29. Thus, the underlying acceleration of thermal expansion in response to the anthropogenic forcing may emerge over the next decade or so, resulting in a further acceleration in the rate from that reported here and recent estimates30. …

What did I say? A joule can’t be in the ocean and multiply into more joules thus exhibiting a lag. If it’s in the ocean, it’s in the ocean.

“Thus, the underlying acceleration of thermal expansion in response to the anthropogenic forcing may emerge over the next decade or so, resulting in a further acceleration in the rate from that reported here and recent estimates…”

Big volcano. Less solar. Less solar in oceans. It’s lag but not magic lag. It’s making up a deficit incurred during the big volcano shading the oceans. It is acceleration caused by a prior deficit. Remove the prior deficit and you don’t have that acceleration. Acceleration measured from a deficit position is not a prophecy fulfilled. The oceans were a bit cooler because of the big volcano. A cause is the prior solar deficit. The quote above says, a big volcano can slow the oceans warming. The fact that it will emerge implies, it didn’t emerge because of a big volcano. So with big volcanoes getting in the way all the time its emergence and acceleration is in a slight way diminished.

Rich Kleinman |
“I would argue that in the face of uncertainty, we should look to the Hippocratic Oath as a source of moral guidance on how to proceed. First do no harm.”
Yet you go on to ignore that by then saying
“In the absence of certainty, there isn’t any good case for not taking a conservative approach.”
The whole point of the Oath is that you should do nothing if you are not certain. Judith is not certain that is why she advocates caution. That is the very reason for taking on a conservative approach.
–
“When you are considering the possibility of a significant reduction in quality of life for future generations, the onus should be on the present generation to cut back on unnecessary luxuries.”
One view, equally possible.
Another could be “When you are considering the possibility of a very significant improvement in quality of life for future generations, the onus should be on the present generation to get all the luxuries they can.”
2 to the 8th g/g/g/g/g/g/grandchildren? 256 nippers running around in 2180.
What the heck would they care what luxuries I had. More to the point the 7 billion people out there now are suffering abject poverty and disease and famine and warfare now!
Who is more important to you? Some unknown infant in 200 years or real people suffering in real time right now.
Oh, right. Your right of course. My mistake.

Rich Kleinman: In the absence of certainty, there isn’t any good case for not taking a conservative approach.

What is a “conservative” approach? With or without global warming, California, Texas, China, the Indus Valley, and many other places will continue to experience alternations of drought and flooding. California is not prepared for its past, not to mention the possibility of future extremes, and is letting its present water works decay, yet is investing heavily in projects aimed to reduce CO2 production. Is that “conservative”? If there is an AGW threat to crops, isn’t the “conservative” approach to maintain or increase the crop-breeding programs that are in place and have been successful to date?

It’s all well and good to convert but in the case of Dr. Curry she knew the “consensus” science claim was political fraud over a decade before her conversion. She had her own career calculations so I’ll never consider her of the stature of scientists like Dr. Lindzen who truly endured brutal treatment by the climate mob for speaking truth that was obvious the moment carbon targeting began. There was never a reasonable science proof to have ever justified the IPCC formation which is/was just back room method to contrive a globalist authority supported by fringe activists which Dr. Curry certainly was a member.

Is she going to return the climate propaganda money she earned when she was full fledged consensus enforcer? Better late then never but the half bake skeptics who want pass it off as an honest “science” debate are fifth column useless as well. The motives of the climate fraud were and are obvious and really can’t be left out of any serious analysis of the hijackers of “consensus” climate claims which clearly aren’t in the line points above.

Emissions are being addressed pragmatically across a plurality of gases and sectors with a plethora of technologies and systems – underpinned by economic growth and development. Uncertainty creates the impetus to focus on pragmatic emission reductions regardless of short term climate variability. The bottom line is that the right questions to ask about climate change are not scientific -fascinating as Earth system science is – but about appropriate responses to diverse human and environmental challenges.

I was interested in Arctic ice cover, thickness, ridges, etc, as early as 1991, when the Soviet Union fell. The data we had available showed a slight decline in the difficulty caused by ice for ships trying to sail as far as the Kara Sea. But to be honest I decided global warming was too iffy to do anything but use the available ~25 year statistics to develop our icebreaker ship design basis. I do notice today the ice is much nicer from Kolguyev all the way to the Ob Gulf. Which explains in part why the Russians are developing Arctic fields at such a fast pace (the other factor being that Western Siberia fields are depleting in a hurry and they have to move north to scratch out a living).

That’s a pretty insulated claim when you’re debating a hack Greenshirt muck raker in Michael Mann. The core political sedition goes back to the early 60’s and Iceage claims. Even earlier in other “man is evil” environmentalists forms.

You attended the People’s Republic of UColorado Boulder in the later incubation phase when they were quite hot to take over carbon and you didn’t see or hear any of the blathering anti-oil and markets screeds that were commonplace even then? Couldn’t detect the James Hansen political signature until 2005? Al Gore, hard to figure out?

This what’s wrong with this brand of “skepticism” while you engage with radical leftist ideologues as if really is a “science” dispute.

The presentation is very good, however I would suggest one minor change. On the elephant slide, I would add a portly, bald scientist with a goatee standing behind the elephant in a pile of elephant dung. He should be holding dung in both hands and his cartoon bubble should say, ” I throw this at anyone who disagrees with me”

This study was simply updating model calculations and introduced new techniques in estimating contributions to SLR. There was nothing about the dynamics of ocean waters increasing ice sheet loss. Nothing in the study provided data on the water temperature changes affecting the marine terminating glaciers or the variability of the thermocline as found in other studies. Most grievously there was not a single mention of the geothermal impacts on the basal melting and movement of glaciers that have been the subject of recent papers.

The paper has no data showing a chain of causality between AGW and SMB loss. The only thing new are the calculation techniques.

Without acknowledging the political underpinnings of “consensus” climate authority ambition from inception the truthful narrative of the broad climate dispute can’t be achieved.

The science segregation debates simply enables the usual suspects and drags out the fraud of CO2 authority grasping. Warming advocate corruption, controlling parameters such as models over real world observations, manipulation of historical data (data torture) are just symptoms. The top end climate academic culture is predisposed to central planning authority, have as high a 90% leftist political ID often extreme in orientation. If the motives of CO2 regulatory rational isn’t in the conversation it’s a score for crooked prevarication.

Skeptics who think policy will be solved with winning charts are fools and/or useful idiots.

Abandoning the, Rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change, fwhat we know and don’t know become a lot more clear and explainable:

Nature has cycles on decadal, centennial and millennial time scales. Add to that the role of the moon and big planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and the effects on the geomagnetic field and galactic cosmic radiation and little is needed — indeed little room is left — for postulating a human causation as an additional factor let alone a rational explanation for all or even most of observed climate change.

Judith,
Your work continues to have a lot of importance, even the ‘negative’ parts like throwing more doubt on dubious assumptions by others.
It is sad that some responses have been so poor, often from people merely reciting the book of dogma rather than the science of data.
Thank you for your fortitude in taking this on. You must have known there would be flack. Geoff.

The rightness of Judith’s science and policy seems undeniable to me. In 1990 I read the first IPCC assessment – as a trained hydrodynamical and hydraulical engineer – my mentor was Cecil Terwilliger – and as a relatively young environmental scientist. I thought first that the radiative physics was plausible and that the solution was systems and technology.

I was at the time Vice-Presient and ‘chief whip’ for the Jervis Bay Protection Committee. It was all middle class skill sets and PR. We could spin those fairy penguins until they got dizzy and fell over. But I am from western Sydney poor white trash stock. I had ferried Vietnam draft dodgers across town while undercover for the Federal Police – who never caught us. I was always more a yippie – in the Ken Kesey house un-American activities committee sense – than a hippy.

So I gave the IPCC not another thought and went back to studying “geomorphic effects of alternating flood and drought dominated regimes on NSW coastal rivers” – Wayne Erskine and Robin Warner sometime in the 80’s. A regime – to answer a silly question – is a flow regime that maintains an identifiable stream morphology for 20 to 30 years and then switches to another. Regimes were identified in flood records back to the 1850’s.

By 1996 and Nate Mantua – I had traced regimes to the upwelling regions of the eastern and central Pacific. I waited patiently for the Pacific state to shift again. As they said it never would. Australia was locked in a permanent drought. Ghost cities would rise out of the ashes of forests. Deserts would swallow others.

But yet again the drought broke and there was a deluge. As it always did at a 20 to 30 year beat over millennia – stochastically forced perhaps by something in the ~ 22 year Hale Cycle of solar magnetic reversal – and projected onto global hydrology. But adding up – as I keep saying – to regimes and abrupt changes at many scales. In 2003 the penny dropped that these regimes were in sync with trajectories of surface temperature and oceanic indices. I stared at those graphs in ever finer detail for 3 days and 3 nights and than had to ring Australia’s greatest hydrologist to confirm that I hadn’t gone crazy.

You can tell it’s chaos because it is not random and does not sum to zero. These guys have been so deluded for so long that the whole alarmist sh!t train has derailed. Now simplistic ‘the science’ isn’t working for them and it’s implicit ties to preferred policy and outcomes are toast. Overturning democracy and capitalism if you listen to any of them and if you push a little. A central economic planning AI overlord according to poor wee willie.

By 2009 I realized that I had got it all wrong. OMG it is not cycles – it is stochastically forced deterministic chaos in a resonant global sub-system. It is much worse than I thought – but the solutions are still systems and technology.

In our world there are three planks of progress on climate.

– economic development and growth
– the Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals including innovative energy and productive agriculture
– living soils and flourishing ecosystems

The natural philosophy of Earth system science (I deny climate science – we should scrap it as a science entirely as there isn’t much worthwhile in the deluge of scientific mediocrity) is fun – and rational policy and economics seem obvious. Well done again Judith.

I just saw this in one of Michael Shellenberger’s recent excellent articles in Forbes:

Brown’s proposal, Rhodes explains, was an extension of the ideas of 19th Century economist Thomas Malthus who lusted for the extermination of his fellow man, particularly the poor and the Irish. “Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor,” Malthus argued, “we should encourage contrary habits…and court the return of the plague.”

In 1966, misanthropic conservationists within the Sierra Club had embraced Malthusianism. Writes Rhodes:

The small-world, zero-population-growth, soft-energy-path faction of the environmental movement that emerge across the 1960s and 1970s knowingly or unknowingly incorporated the antihumanist ideology of the neo-Malthusians into its arguments… “more power plants create more industry,” [the Sierra Club’s executive director complained,] “that in turn invites greater population density.”

Such anti-humanist ideas came full bloom in Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich’s 1967 Sierra Club pamphlet, The Population Bomb, which depicted poor people in India as animals “screaming…begging…defecating and urinating.”

In sharp contrast, the creators of nuclear power remained optimistic and humanistic. They viewed the new energy source as the key to avoiding the problems created by a growing human population — and allowing everyone, including the poorest of the poor in Africa, to rise from poverty.

But literal-minded nuclear advocates like Weinberg missed the point. Cheap and abundant energy was — for Malthusians — not a feature but rather a bug. The Sierra Club and other environmentalists hated nuclear because it held out the promise of universal prosperity.

It was at that moment that environmental groups and their philanthropic supporters began a half-century long campaign to frighten the public. “Our campaign stressing the hazards of nuclear power,” wrote Sierra Club’s President in a 1974 memo to the board of directors, “will supply a rationale for increasing regulation and add to the cost of the industry.”

What point did you want me to take from it? I’ll comment on two sentences on page 1237.

Let us first arbitrarily assume that nuclear power plants should be as safe as coal-burning plants, so as not to increase public risk.

Electricity generated by nuclear is already 400 times safer than electricity generated coal in the US and Europe, and 1600 times safer than coal-burning plants world average (on a full life cycle basis.

Can a nuclear power plant be engineered with a predicted performance of less than 1 catastrophic failure in 100 plant years of operation?

I am not clear what he means by ‘Catastrophic’. Major accidents are defines as those with five or more fatalities. On that basis, there has been only one catastrophic nuclear accident (Chernobyl) in over 17,600 reactor years of operation. So, nuclear safety performance has surpassed that 1969 aim by a factor of 176, and climbing.

You mentionned the talk of Tim Palmer where around 10” he uses a chaotic device to argue that “chaos doesn’t matter” because “probabilities can be predicted” .

You probably didn’t fall into the trap but it seems necessary to debunk this wrong pseudo-analogy because if Palmers misunderstands non linear dynamics, it is probable that the crushing majority of people in attendance (one can identify them because they applaud) and even more in the general public misunderstand it totally .

1. The chaotic device used .

We have a simple system with a 2D phase space governed by a non linear ordinary differential equation . It has 4 fixed points and is invariant for rotations around the axis of the pendulum . Therefore it follows trivially without any calculations that in this case every fixed point has the same probability (e.g 25 %) . Of course if there exists no rotation around the axis of the pendulum which leaves the magnets invariant (easiest way is to move the axis of the pendulum) , the probabilities are no more equal but can still be calculated because of the rotational invariance .
The trajectory of the pendulum is here irrelevant regardless if it is chaotic or non chaotic because the answer on the question asked is obtained by the existence of 4 fixed points and trivial symetry and invariance considerations .

2. What has this device to do with the climate ?

Nothing . An aggravating circumstance is that it misleads people who don’t understand chaos to think that they understood something about the climate .
The phase space of the climate is uncountably infinite dimensional . Its behaviour is governed by non linear PDE and not ODE what leads to spatio-temporal chaos and not the simple temporal chaos that Palmers used . There are no symetries, no fixed points and therefore no unambiguously defined probabilities .
If one wanted to use a magnetic pendulum analogy (which would still be wrong but at least less misleading) for the climate one would have to use a pendulum of infinite length with a plate of infinite size . On the plate would be an infinite number of magnets which move . It would then appear that it is actually not even possible to predict whether the pendulum stops or not .
In the case when it stops it would be impossible to assign any probability to the individual magnet where it stops and this regardless whether there is a wedge or not .
A scientist facing this device would immediately and correctly conclude that the only way to understand the system is to understand the dynamics of the moving magnets . Without this understanding the probability to make a correct prediction of any sort (probabilistic or not) in the case when a wedge is inserted would be zero .
The conclusion would then be “chaos matters” and “probabilities cannot be generally predicted” what is exactly the opposite of what Palmers said .

Tomas Milanovic: You mentionned the talk of Tim Palmer where around 10” he uses a chaotic device to argue that “chaos doesn’t matter” because “probabilities can be predicted” .

Good post. A lot of these discussions of chaos would be nearer the mark if accompanied by caveats, such as “Maybe something in the climate works like this instead of that, and that therefore climate distributions may be reasonably predictable for up to 100 years”. Instead of the “maybe” and a set of reasonably plausible chaotic scenarios, we get what looks like an extremely confident assertion that one example of the many is necessarily how the climate works.

I’ll repeat my reference to a book chapter by Ludwick Arnold, Gabrielle Bleckert and Klaus Reiner Schenk-Hoppe: “The stochastic Brusselator: Parametric Noise destroys Hopf Bifurcation” in the volume “Stochastic Dynamics” edited by Hans Crauel and Matthias Gundlach, published by Springer, 1992. Granted that the Brusselator might not be a good analogy to anything in climate (you could repeat these experiments with the Lorenz Oscillator, or I could for that matter), If it is better to think of the climate system as a deterministic system plus random variation, then it might be worthwhile to think that all of the analogies of climate drawn from the deterministic dynamical systems literature might be misleading.

So, is it better to think of the climate dynamics as a deterministic chaotic system or as a deterministic chaotic system plus random variation? How could anyone tell, especially given that we don’t have even one system of dynamic equations that comes close to modeling the actual climate time series? For now it is enough to note that the noise can dramatically change the probability distribution of the trajectories.

This goes beyond what you wrote. I think you did good service by examining in detail the claims by one scientist (two if they are endorsed by RIE) based on one model.

Lovely to hear from you – although you may remember me more as chief hydrologist. No more – the first casualties of the climate war is humor and civility.

The pendulum will unavoidably start from slightly different points even with the utmost care – run it 100 times and there will be one set of statistics. The wedge changes the statistics over another 100 runs. But there the utility of the pendulum as a climate – or more clearly climate model – analogue is exhausted.

Tim Palmer’s interest is in medium range forecasts using
100’s to 1000’s of stochastically initialized runs to define a probability distribution. Just as is routinely done in weather forecasting. Let’s not throw the baby away with the bathwater just yet.

In the real world small changes – such as CO2 – push the system past a threshold and change then occurs at a rate determined by internal responses – abrupt and unpredictable – as a different behavior emerges in the system. This is seen in climate data at many scales. A dynamical systems explanation for Hurst effects in Nilometer data for instance – rather than infinite memory first proposed. All completely deterministic but seemingly random shifts in quasi standing waves in spatio-temporal chaos.

In all the “scientific” debates about the future, there are extremely large realities that are almost completely missing.

These concern the proposed “solutions” side of life that scientist-advocates wish to change.

There are thousands of flat graphs.

There is almost no discssion of the real-world social-industrial-commercial effects of these airy data discussions.

WHAT IS A GEMBA WALK?

Toyota requires its people to “gemba walk” the realities they want to change, before they can engineer any changes. Live with users. Live with workers. Live at the mine. Live at the scrap heap.

Then ask, “what is the smallest thing I can do right now, with the largest benefit, and least harm, to the largest number of “nodes” in the global ecosystem?”

Toyota and Honda do this worldwide. Honda had people living in Brazil years before they entered the market. Honda trains locals to build outboard motors in “developing” regions – so Honda can learn many local social, environmental, commercial realities…before they move to larger motorcycle and automotive systems.

They almost never include the long term realities of solar, wind, EV’s , etc.

They argue that industrial experts are the enemy. Don’t walk in their shoes for even a kilometer, because you then become corrupted

Let’s take a Gemba walk through some of the realities of our world.

If I have any agenda, it is that walking the world with your enemy often leads to insights you can’t possibly hypothesize, or prove with a computer.

MY BACKGROUND:

I am not legally defined as a scientist in modern US/EU certifications, but have been working around the world on the realities “climate scientists” keep talking about – anecdotally – in their debates.

I helped write the mobile source pollution and emissions control laws, and worked on their implementation.

I know exactly how the cost benefit equations are constructed, and tweaked, for various political means. My capital cost frameworks for mobile source are still contained in the regulations.

I sat in the rooms at DOT and EPA and watched the political interpretations of data happen – in several different now proven wrong directions – as new data were gathered and new political beliefs came to power, again in many different directions.

Against sulphur. Then Nitrogen. Then CO2. Etc.

WORKING AT THE GEMBA

More importantly, most of my work has been to document – on the ground – and improve the massive industries that create, and can reduce, pollution and energy consumption.

I have worked in most of the mine-to-recycling chains of the automakers worldwide. Thousands of factories and sites. In my government role and in industry work to deploy modern technology and streamlne operations.

I also did worldwide work on stationary-source energy cycles – and can tell you unequivocally that the main “technology” that will mitigate the energy consumption effect of housing, factories etc – is passive geothermal, and conservation in use. Adobe is the most prolific and widespread building material in history. Caves. Pueblos. Heat sinks are nothing new.

I have done similar work in electronics. For 10 years I traveled the world documenting how 7 billion humans obtained, and use mobile devices. And – have been studying the massive new industrial realities of the “electronic cloud” that now connects all humans to each other.

This includes analyzing the data centers, physical logistics, and other dimensions of Google, Amazon, Alibaba, and others around the world.

Notice that Google and others each now spend more on capital equipment every year than any auto company.

Notice the lessons this has for us with respect to the global power grid.

Web surfing instead of driving….web surfing WHILE driving….

Energy is always physical.

Yin Yang.

TRAVELING THE GEMBA ALWAYS LEADS TO NEW “MENTAL MODELS” OF THINGS WE THINK WE UNDERSTAND ALREADY

In all these areas, my work was to analyze the success and failure of large scale innovations. The Toyota way. Airbags. Catalysts. Stack scrubbers. Dams/hydro. Data centers. Electronics production. Etc

My physical work is guided by a mental framework I learned long ago from Japanese auto manufacturers.

Learn by wandering around…deviating often from your plan…and trying to DO the things you say others should do.

AMERICANS AND EUROPEANS TEND TO LOOK AT THE ENDS OF THEIR NOSES

How much did we sell today?

How many solar panels did we deploy?

What is the single-point output of our new forecast model?

Did I win my argument with Judith Curry in Congress today?

America is an instant-fix, give-me-a-billion-dollars-today, culture

The most sustainable organizations have very different views of the world.

GEMBA-DERIVED MENTAL MODELS AND REAL-WORLD ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE

Japanese manufacturers, and trading companies, who had to import ALL their raw materials from around the world…sell to more than 100 nations worldwide…and who had NO room on the island for the vast junkyards that sprawl across America….

…developed very different mental models of industry, compared to the water-in-plastic bottles culture of the US.

Toyota taught me that all industry happens in a CIRCLE, that constanty recycles itself – and that industry is the largest PART OF society – NOT something OPPOSED TO society.

(Note the current US/EU political mental model that there are “commercial” and “social” forces that are in OPPOSITION to each other. Notice that the difference between “social ” and “commercial” innovation in the US is really a function of TAX LAWS, not the real-world.)

Toyota used diagrams to show that industry is a CYCLE that repeats itself over and over.

This is why Japanese cars have JIT production. Why they are built for easy DISASSEMBLY, not just speed of assembly. Why they can sell more than 70% of their parts in USED replacement markets, why they can recycle their materials with minimal energy use or earthbound waste, etc

And they learned – in an atomic blast that completely flattened centuries of industrial development…..

…that absolutely no one can predict the future.

No one. No matter how smart, degreed, wealthy, senstive, kind…..can predict the future.

That’s why they built the Prius.

Two energy sources. Simpler, safer, RECYCLABLE battery (versus the e-waste in a Tesla battery). Lots of range with minimal energy input compared to average. Raw material requiring much less mining (visit salars to see water reality of lithium mining). Easy to disassemble, with most parts capable of being sold as used. Etc

Toyota sold more than 10,000,000 hybrid units….while scientists and legislators debated.

Real, positive, do-able, NOW results.

Toyota is already in the business of end-of-life, environmentally sound, recycling of hybrid vehicles.

They learned more than any climate scientist – how the full life-cycle of an alternative energy vehicle works, at scale…

..while thousands of scientists flew carbon into the skies to attend meetings and debate things that might happen 100 years from now.

Industry happens in CYCLES – and if you behave this way, you will create more social-commercial-environmental benefit…

…than if you just fight over single-point, tip-of-nose predictions.

Toyota and Honda are two of the only auto companies who remained profitable during some of the harshest economic cycles of the past 50 years.

And they are environmental leaders, at scale, in the real world.

The environment can be sustainably profitable

SO WHAT?

First, judithcurry.com is a wonderful long-look resource in a tip-of-nose social civil war.

Second most of the “consensus” climate-scientist assertions do not include or comprehend the long-cycle, real-world effects of their current political requests.

I travel the world documenting solar, wind, hydro, and other innovations – IN THEIR ENTIRE CYCLES – as they expand.

THE GEMBA OF ENERGY STORAGE

When one stands in the salars of LATAM and watches the water, wind, and local economic effects of lithium mining…

….and then notices that most of the materials in high-tech batteries cannot be effectively recycled….

…and then notices that the “climate scientist certified” expansion of “free” solar and wind….will require billions of tons of NEW mined materials for ENERGY STORAGE…

…one develops a certain skepticism for the cheap and easy prononcements of academic scientists and poliicians who will face very few consequences of their end-of-nose, 100 year out assertions.

Few of the fewer than 10,000 “climate scientists” have traveled the gemba’s they wish to affect.

Few of them connect wind and solar to water, even though the Springerville Dam is almost directly connected to Tesla Heaven in Los Angeles.

Perhaps a 2 year gemba walk, on all continents, should be as mandatory as a thesis-defense before anyone gets their climate science PhD.

BRINGING THE GEMBA HOME – A WIND EXPERIMENT

I have conducted my own intentionally “unscientific” experiments.

I know that non-quantifiable, multi-dimensional learning is far more accurate than hundreds of single point graphs – IF one wants to create real social change.

That’s why people test drive cars – and try on different shirts, even if they are all marked “medium”.

I’ve recorded video, with accurate audio, in the middle of large wind farms.

It contains the 4-second repeating shadow of turibine blades, and the physical sensation of low-frequency displacement of air.

I learned to do this by talking to people who had wind farms move in next door to them.

I play this for groups around the world, and I stop talking.

Within 30 seconds, people start to get edgy. After a minute the edginess increases.

I have to correct this audience response for the modern social affliction of attentional disorder…the neurological need to check one’s mobile device every 7 seconds.

Are people anxious because something is drawing their attention away from their mobile phone…delaying their brain-stem need for a “Facebook fix?”

I’m not sure, but I can certify that with this video/audio experiment, irritation goes up, and cell phone “praying” goes down.

I make no forecasts from this experiment.

But I make suggestions.

To any scientist who claims wind is clean and has no environmental effect, I suggest you set up a tent in a wind farm for a week.

I also suggest you look into the realities of carbon fiber recycling, as well as the massive global battery business you implicitly suggest.

AND THEN THERE ARE BATTERIES AND SOLAR PANELS

This verbal Gemba walk is already long….

…but I will close with one suggestion.

Before you believe anyone about vague temperatures of the future….

…get a real world handle on the emerging new – MASS-FULL and ENERGY INTENSIVE – mega industries of batteries/storage, and the recycling of e-waste from solar panels, batteries, and distribution gear.

Most academic scientists will at some point refer to a European graduate student while paper that says a postage-stamp size chunk of land in Africa can power most or all of Europe.

Waking the gemba from Algeria to Alsace would be an interesting start for an elementary education in the networked realities most climate scientists omit from their single-point forecasts and slogans.

If one does walk the gemba chain from solar/wind, to end use, and then recycling, one will see BATTERIES…trillions of batteries in our future.

ALL of these batteries, at scale, will bring you to a DERIVATIVE gemba walk you probably never contemplated…even if you are a government-certified “climate scientist”.

Storage and mediation of energy.

This gemba walk will scale thousands of miles around the world – IF you really want to understand the physical mass that will have to move around if housiing, transportation, manufacturing, food production, and all the other “energy intensive” industries must meet the UNEXPLORED global system changes hidden behind the pretty charts in climate projections.

And if you are lucky in your gemba walk, you might stumble across the very few, small-scale, pilot factories that are just beginning to deal with the life cycle of the “clean” – glass, plastic, metal – solar panels that have expanded rapidly in the past 15 years. And the EV’s containing 200-300 kilos of moving e-waste.

Most climate scientists are still feeling the “high” of NEW installation of solar panels and batteries.

This allows them to opine, with short-sight evidence, that solar and wind are “free” and “sustainable”.

These solar/wind/storage installations are so new, and so small – that they have not begun to hit their recycling and waste realities that will expand rapidly as “climate scientists” assert they should.

Anyone who tells you they know the life-cycle effects of the “alternative energy” future – are likely to be as accurate as the geneticists who created the concept of “junk DNA” 17 years ago – and now must admit that “junk DNA” is really part of the “microbiome” that is now scientifically proven to be much more important than “just regular 2001 DNA”.

CONCLUSION – THE SCIENTIFIC CITATION

If climate scientists actually spent as much time visiting the thousands of miles of supply-demand-waste systems required for “clean energy” balance and storage….as they spent earning their advanced degrees…..

…they might better understand the long term realities of the wonders of science that are so well captured in the article below…written by a real scientist in a real journal.

Allow yourself to be ignorant enough to understand the real-world effects of water use in utility-scale batteries.

Ignorant enough to learn the lessons of adobe and passive geothermal.

Ignorant enough to learn how genetic science is creating forms of micro-energy, and macro-recycling that are NOT EVEN BEING CONTEMPLATED – by massive goverment subsidies to the now-outdated forms of wind and solar technology most climate scientists, with no business experience, still say are “free”.

That ignorance may bring you to actually use your trained mind to stop arguing about points on a graph, and lend a shoulder to the real work that 7 billion people really need to improve life on the planet.

What an absurd person he is. As a child it’s true I fought for survival every day in the streets. As an adult I did martial arts for 40 years with absolute control and discipline. He might be referring to Springer – who was threatening to bring a gun to a barfight at the Great Western Hotel in Rockhampton – where a man can drink, spit and ride bulls.

If we honestly reflect on the course of this ridiculous exchange – it is apparent that I disagreed with the fundamental premise of Lang’s silly little meme. Without being at all deprecating – just science. It was followed as usual by a deluge of insults and calumny. And yes I am quite over it.

Excellent post, many good insights. “Spend a little time getting stupid again.
That’s where all breakthrough science and entrepreneurship happens.”

I have a sense of “certainty”, that the following will continue:

Computer computational power doubles every 18 months; nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years; clinical knowledge every 18 months.
On average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months. According to IBM, the build-out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours.

Consensus climate science plods along with sausage machination prognostications using the current state of technology to extrapolate forward to define the climate 100 years out. Nothings missing, it’s settled, the models say so, nothing else to plug into those predictions; we know all that we need to know!

Too bad it’s not possible to take consensus scientists and distill them down to just one genius, maybe then we could get an epiphany or two.

“Nothings missing, it’s settled, the models say so, nothing else to plug into those predictions; we know all that we need to know!”

Huh. No climate scientist or modeler ever said this or believes it.
We dont know everything we need to know, but we have known ENOUGH, to know for decades that we cannot dump c02 without some consequences. We know enough to know that when you put c02 in my air, that it is not risk free.

There’s no risk in destroying the 14% of the greening of the planet as reparations for human misdeeds? Any “technology hockey stick curves” being developed to apply to model equations? I see risks everywhere I look.

There are many metrics to risk, risk is different than settled. But okay, Steven, climate science isn’t settled.

I’m never quite able to grasp the double think involved. We are changing the atmosphere with no idea of consequences. But with technological innovations in the next decade or so CO2 emissions are a blip.

And for an actually greener planet – carbon is much better when restored to agricultural soils and ecosystems than in the atmosphere.

We dont know everything we need to know, but we have known ENOUGH, to know for decades that we cannot dump c02 without some consequences. We know enough to know that when you put c02 in my air, that it is not risk free.

“The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. We are trying to understand how the earth’s climate system is engineered, so we can understand what it takes to trigger mode switches. Until we do, we cannot make good predictions about future climate change… Over the last several hundred thousand years, climate change has come mainly in discrete jumps that appear to be related to changes in the mode of thermohaline circulation.” Wally Broecker

It is nowhere near as simple as Peter Lang insists so often and warming is not guaranteed.

In Internet slang, a troll (/troʊl, trɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion,[3] often for the troll’s amusement.

Ellison jumped in with a response to me that did not relate to the points in my comment, and misrepresented what I’d said (as usual). Ellison’s reply said:

“The climate system has jumped from one mode of operation to another in the past. …”

It is nowhere near as simple as Peter Lang insists so often and warming is not guaranteed.

This is not relevant to my point and contains misrepresentations.

I have never said that climate changes, and abrupt changes, do not occur. I’ve repeatedly said they do. It’s a misrepresentation

I’ve never said climate change or the estimating the impacts “is simple”. That’s another misrepresentation

I’ve never said “warming is guaranteed”. That’s another misrepresentation.

What I am saying, and have been saying for many years, is that empirical evidence suggests that any global warming that does occur would be beneficial, not detrimental and not dangerous. However, substantial abrupt global cooling would be very bad.

In short, my point is about the impacts of global warming (if it occurs), not climate science.

It has all disappeared as I said it would. Yet here we are again. My comment included a 2018 paper on measured change in AMOC from the 26 degree north array. Hence the possibly of AMOC disruption and global cooling. Warming is not guaranteed as I said. Hence Peter’s meme is moot. Uncertainty and risk is what matters for the future.

Hi Peter,
Do you have criteria to describe the type of person who has held back nuclear and generally made resource development harder, via the unwanted insertion of the chattering class into the process? Geoff

Judith [? never sure of the correct address for you but anyway].
Thank you for your excellent presentation and points.
I used it to show my wife the views of a climate realist as she has been and remains an ardent warmist. [No effect].
Also the fact that one can change from sure to uncommitted.
Australian middle class remains firmly fixated on being politically correct and only getting worse.
I did try to give a few suggestions because I was worried that you were being too nice the last time you presented alongside him. No need as it turns out and I guess there never was.
I will certainly use the ideas in your presentation as a reference in discussions in future.

Yes, not much hope in Australia’s future at present! I write regularly to The Australian, one of the very few outlets for good sense on most issues. Today’s energy letter:

There are no good grounds for preferencing electric cars (“By 2040, all new cars on our roads ‘will be electric’,” 15/6). They should have no subsidies and should pay an equivalent tax to that raised by petrol usage. Governments should buy vehicles which offer best value for taxpayers’ money whatever their motive power. In addition, rapid uptake of electric cars would further exacerbate our problem of precarious electricity supply.

I have a 3-door Mitsubishi Pajero – the street version of the car that won Paris-Dakar 12 times. And a brand new turbo diesel Suzuki Vitara that drives beautifully on outback roads and gets nearly 900 km from a 47 L tank. But both are dinosaurs.

Very interesting is the image of the sealevel rise short after 1850 (9 Is CO2 the control knob for global sea level rise?). So this should be the time, when the modern gulf stream developed. Before 1790 it looked so:

It is this that suggests to catastrophists that changes in the Earth system are overwhelmingly anthropogenic. Almost entirely attributing warming to human emissions with more warming in the pipeline due to ocean thermal inertia.

It is complete nonsense. Most variability in Earth’s energy budget is due to deterministic chaotic shifts in ocean and atmosphere circulation. It is a matter of scientific fact shown conclusively in satellite data and not subject to debate.

Large annual variability has significant implications for ocean heat change. Ocean heat does not change slowly as a result of greenhouse gases and thermal inertia but warms and cools rapidly in response to the very large annual signal.

Most warming in Argo happened in the tropics – mostly in the eastern and central Pacific – in response to cloud changes related to ocean surface temps.

There are strategies used by catastrophists to retain their agnotology.

1. It doesn’t exist – we know all the forcings and climate is purely in static equilibrium.
2. It is purely periodic and sums to zero leaving only forced changes.

“You can see spatio-temporal chaos if you look at a fast mountain river. There will be vortexes of different sizes at different places at different times. But if you observe patiently, you will notice that there are places where there almost always are vortexes and they almost always have similar sizes – these are the quasi standing waves of the spatio-temporal chaos governing the river. If you perturb the flow, many quasi standing waves may disappear. Or very few. It depends.” Tomas Milanovich

The chaotic pendulum of Tim Palmer is a perfect analogue of climate models. The is no deterministic solution – as Tomas rightly said. But sampling of the state space is possible. The pendulum will unavoidably start from slightly different points even with the utmost care – run it 100 times and there will be one set of statistics. The small wedge – representing CO2 – results in a different statistics.
Almost no one seems to understand what the implications of this for climate models are.

In the real world small changes – such as CO2 – push the system past a threshold and change then occurs at a rate determined by internal responses – abrupt and unpredictable – as a different behavior emerges in the system. This is seen in climate data at many scales. A dynamical systems explanation for Hurst effects in Nilometer data for instance – rather than infinite memory as first proposed. All completely deterministic but seemingly random shifts in quasi standing waves in spatio-temporal chaos at all scales in time and space. From ENSO to ice ages. It doesn’t sum to zero.

The problem with chaos in climate is catastrophe – in the sense of Rene Thom. Large shifts in global hydrology with mega-droughts and mega-floods and changes in temps locally of as much as 16 degrees C in as little as a decade.

The energy added by CO2 insulation alone exceeds the ocean heat content rise of the last few decades by a factor of several. It is the elephant in the room when it comes to the cause of the warming and accounting for the actual numbers of Joules in the system along with its accelerated rate of change.

“The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.”

“Since “panta rhei” was pronounced by Heraclitus, hydrology and the objects it studies, such as rivers and lakes, have offered grounds to observe and understand change and flux. Change occurs on all time scales, from minute to geological, but our limited senses and life span, as well as the short time window of instrumental observations, restrict our perception to the most apparent daily to yearly variations. As a result, our typical modelling practices assume that natural changes are just a short-term “noise” superimposed on the daily and annual cycles in a scene that is static and invariant in the long run. According to this perception, only an exceptional and extraordinary forcing can produce a long-term change. The hydrologist H.E. Hurst, studying the long flow records of the Nile and other geophysical time series, was the first to observe a natural behaviour, named after him, related to multi-scale change, as well as its implications in engineering designs. Essentially, this behaviour manifests that long-term changes are much more frequent and intense than commonly perceived and, simultaneously,
that the future states are much more uncertain and unpredictable on long time horizons than implied by standard approaches. Surprisingly, however, the implications of multi-scale change have not been assimilated in geophysical sciences. A change of perspective is thus needed, in which change and uncertainty are essential parts.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02626667.2013.804626

But as I say – Jimmy is stuck at No. 2 – and he seems to think his unsubstantiated opinion matters more than Dimitris Koutsoyiannis’ or – indeed – Judith Curry’s.

I think actual quantified Joules matter most and CO2 has provided what is needed to explain the warming of the oceans and surface. Handwaving about the Nile just doesn’t cut it when you have the numbers.

GHG’s delay by nanoseconds the emission of IR photons in specific frequencies to space – increasing energy in the atmosphere at any time. but it is a small factor in changes in the TOA energy budget. Unless you can express things precisely and preferably mathematically – then it remains just one of Jimmy’s misleading and quite irrelevant narrative.

They have got the physics completely wrong and haven’t a clue about rational policy. Jimmy can’t even think about that of course.

CO2 emissions are a blip and in the order of 100 billion tonnes of carbon are better restored to soils and ecosystems than in the atmosphere. But at the end of the day – if climate doesn’t shift radically – it is just 1E-15 W/m2 and a slightly warmer planet.

It is not happening Jimmy – it’s just wild stories with zilch credibility.

Emissions are being addressed pragmatically across a plurality of gases and sectors with a plethora of technologies and systems – underpinned by economic growth and development. Uncertainty creates the impetus to focus on pragmatic emission reductions regardless of short term climate variability. The bottom line is that the right questions to ask about climate change are not scientific but about appropriate responses to diverse human and environmental challenges.

This is position of skeptics and moderates alike – including Judith Curry above? So why the endless repetition of farcical scenarios of catastrophe? They don’t add up. No catastrophe is possible in your reckoning. I’m a catastrophist – in the sense of Rene Thom – but that’s a mountain you are yet to climb.

Why not get another hobby? Because you have no love of or capacity for natural philosophy.

It requires a reduction in per capita use of carbon and fast. The global population is increasing and emissions need to be halved at the same time. This needs to be borne mostly by advanced high-emitting countries. For example the advanced countries need to reduce per capita emissions by 80% by 2100 to stabilize things. This does not happen automatically, and if you look at the US government, there is a complete lack of awareness on this point.

“We are destroying the planet for the other current inhabitants and our collective offspring.”
True.
Could it be a necessary phase, a rite of passage top something better.?
Are we Helicopter Warmists trying to prevent a natural and unavoidable evolutionary development?
At the same time we are the first creatures to tap into and find new ways to use the resources of the planet. Theoretically a bacteria that liked uranium could grow a nuclear bomb. Solar panels are old hat, the trees do that but again a life form or symbiote with no photosynthesis could now be made to produce energy, electricity and light.
We are the first to dig up and use carbon for power, does this have to be a bad thing?
We are actually reducing our risk re survival of advere climate events by greenhouses, cloning and genetic modification.
One thing we never hear about is the development of new species, Theoretically this should be happening at an enhanced rate now. Birds, lizards, foxes and rabbits in the heart of big cities. Well Gecko’s are the masters but still adaptation is also marvelous.
I like the concept of Helicopter warmists.

AGW will be proven wrong as global temperatures fail to show any further warming much less now in a cooling trend.
Overall sea surface temperatures now in a nice down trend. This being due to very weak solar (UV/NEAR UV LIGHT ) which is what determines sea surface temperatures not the phony CO2/INFRARED relationship versus sea surface temperatures.
The North Atlantic now -.60c below 1981-2010 means needs to be monitored along with land areas in the high Arctic. This is a place where change could impact the global climate.
AGW THEROY – not one of the basic premises has come to be from the lower troposphere hot spot, to distinct stratospheric cooling, to a decrease in OLR, to a more zonal atmospheric circulation to overall sea surface temperatures warming.
ENSO a natural CLIMATIC FACTOR was responsible for the recent warmth not AGW. One can see this by looking at the MEI index over the past few years.
My two solar conditions for cooling are now present which are 10+ years of sub solar activity in general (which started in year 2005) and within this sub solar activity in general a period of very low average value solar parameters (which started in year 2018/late 2017) whose values are greater in degree of magnitude and duration of time which commonly occurs between typical solar minimums between normal sunspot cycles.
The theory is simple which is very low prolonged minimum solar conditions result in overall lower sea surface temperatures (less UV/NEAR UV LIGHT )and a slightly higher albedo(due to an increase in explosive volcanic activity and an increase in snow/cloud coverage the result lower global temperatures.
The geo magnetic field modifying the solar activity.
The upshot is a climatic regime change which happens in decades if not years. Since post Dalton times till now the climate has been in the same climatic regime. It is common to have temperature fluctuations of +/- 1 c within a climatic regime due to ENSO/VOLCANIC ACTIVITY.
When the climate changes to another climate regime it usually happens at the top of the previous climatic regime and changes in the opposite direction. This is what I think is taking place now with year 2018 being the transitional year. If one looks at the climatic history that is what it shows more often then not.
In addition if one looks at the climatic history they will see the climate of today is in no way unique, and that every period of prolonged solar activity has been associated with lower overall global temperatures.
I say if my theory is correct AGW will be proven wrong prior to year 2020.
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Jim D | June 15, 2018 at 10:54 pm |
Insulation restricts the escape of heat. GHGs restrict the escape of heat.
…………………………..
Jim D,
When insulation restricts the escape of heat, how can that not make another volume colder than it would have been if the escape of heat was not restricted? Elsewhere I asked what the difference was between a CO2 insulation molecule trapping heat and a magnifying glass creating heat.
Do you think we could theoretically change global temperatures by focussing huge numbers of magnifying glasses like we did as kids to set paper alight?
Geoff

Geoff, insulation doesn’t really restrict the escape of heat, it slows it down . If we neglect any transitories and only look at the steady state regime, it is quite easy to see how it works .
1) More CO2 means more absorption & emission of infrared photons

3) Lower mean free path means that the photons stay for a longer time in every volume dV .

4) Photons staying for a longer time in a volume dV means that there is more of them in dV per time unit .

5) More photons in dV per time unit means higher energy in dV per time unit

6) Higher energy in dV per time unit generally means a higher temperature

QED

So as this is true for every dV, it is true that the temperature of every dV will be higher . By how much is another quite complicated question but if one considers theoretically “everything else being equal” (and I know that everything else is not equal in the case of the atmosphere) then at least the sign of the variation is 100 % sure . The temperature increases when the number of CO2 (or H20 or CH4 or …) molecules increases in every dV everything else being equal .

Do I know something you don’t? I seriously doubt it. I was going by a plot in G.W. Petty’s “A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation”. The plot shows the OLR spectrum observed over the Antarctic ice sheet. I could be wrong but it appears from the plot that atmospheric emissions in the band dominated by CO2 are contributing to surface cooling.

This is a bit quick, Thomas. First, as you say at the end, this does not describe the atmosphere. What does it describe? Second, the photons do not stay, so they have no mean free path. They are converted into unquantized energy. Third, if both absorption and emission increase then the energy per unit volume can go down as well as up. Forth, I do not understand what dV means. Is it per unit volume or something?

Mind you I agree with the abstraction, but it tells us nothing about reality. Yes, CO2 is a GHG, but satellite observations tell us that increasing CO2 has not increased temperature. Why not is the grand question.

“Climate is ultimately complex. Complexity begs for reductionism. With reductionism, a puzzle is studied by way of its pieces. While this approach illuminates the climate system’s components, climate’s full picture remains elusive. Understanding the pieces does not ensure understanding the collection of pieces. This conundrum motivates our study.” Marcia Wyatt

It is one of the ‘components’ of the climate system. The sun is the source of the vast majority of heat on the surface of the planet. The atmosphere is mostly transparent to incoming visible light and the surface is warmed. Warm surfaces emit infrared (IR) photons. At specific IR frequencies greenhouse gases resonate with outgoing photons resulting in vibrations, rotations, translations and electron orbit excitations. All with the quantum photon energy of the Planck constant times the frequency. The kinetic energy of molecules – heat – is transferred to other molecules in the atmosphere heating the atmosphere. Energy is conserved inter alia as higher states of electron excitation. Ultimately photons will be re-emitted in random directions as electron orbits jump to a lower quantum state of excitation – bouncing around the atmosphere – with more greenhouse gases nano seconds longer than they otherwise would. It is this mechanism that maintains the habitability of the planet – and more greenhouse gases result in incremental warming of oceans and atmosphere.

I puzzle about wave/particle duality as photons travel in a probabilistic wave along mean free paths – but I suppose it resolves itself when photons strike molecules. dV btw is simply a finite volume of atmosphere.

The atmosphere contains about 4% of global energy – the surface at 2m about half that, Has the planet -oceans and atmosphere – warmed this century?

“I puzzle about wave/particle duality as photons travel in a probabilistic wave along mean free paths…”

Your puzzle led to my puzzle. Considering photons as a particle, their energy would transfer at impact, like a game of billiards. If photons behaved as a wave, waves can and do bend around objects with mass besides those with a charge. It seems simplistic to view long waves leaving earth’s surface in straight lines. More to my point, really a query, would it be more accurate to view some proportion of exiting long waves to bend around resident molecules and exiting earth, their behavior resembling on a clear sky? And in particular, the associated calculated heating by an increasing proportion of greenhouse gases such as CO2, would be less if the photon behaved as a wave, bypassing this and potentially other greenhouse gases. We would see less atmospheric heating than anticipated even as the number of long wave photons increase while leaving earth’s surface.

I like the way your mind works. Light does bend around objects. But particle/wave duality has always seemed more metaphysics than physics to me. The location of a particle in the light wave is realized in collision with an object and other probabilities collapse in a countless infinity of worlds? Duality seems more a mystery than a coherent theory.

Tomas,
If you claim a slow down of heat transfer, you seem to be heading towards known math of heat transfer. In these equation, a change of heat transfer rate as in a rod or column of atmosphere, is usually a consequence of a change of source (as in earth) or receiver (as in space) properties, which will reach a new effective equilibrium if left for a long enough time.
Your example might survive of you postulate the addition or reduction of energy somewhere along the rod as opposed to the classic ends. Is this what you postulate? You would need then to address whether a new equilibrium arises. Geoff.

I note that many comments have predictably disappeared – and I suggest that people proactively refrain from such behavior. But this one from Jimmy also seems to have disappeared

“It requires a reduction in per capita use of carbon and fast. The global population is increasing and emissions need to be halved at the same time. This needs to be borne mostly by advanced high-emitting countries. For example the advanced countries need to reduce per capita emissions by 80% by 2100 to stabilize things. This does not happen automatically, and if you look at the US government, there is a complete lack of awareness on this point.”

The emphasis is always on emissions from energy production. But that is a small part of the picture. If we assume for the moment that emission reductions are desirable – there are multiple gases and multiple sectors to address. I am a catastrophist in the sense of Rene Thom. The small greenhouse gas – and aerosol – ‘wedge’ – inter alia – has the potential to cause large, adverse and extreme change in the climate system – including the potential for planetary cooling through AMOC disruption. So I suggest that we do want to change many things in our stewardship of the planet

Population is a key – and that responds to economic growth, development, agricultural productivity, child mortality, safe water and sanitation, health and education, etc. The smart development goals of Bjorn Lomberg provide cost effective goals in these areas. His emphasis is on aid and philanthropy – but at the end of the day they can only be delivered with economic development.

The key to economic development is agricultural productivity. Increased agricultural productivity, increased downstream processing and access to markets build local economies and global wealth. Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets to emit less black carbon and reduce the health and environmental impacts, developing better and cheaper ways of producing electricity, replacing cooking with wood and dung with better ways of preparing food thus avoiding respiratory disease and again reducing black carbon emissions. A global program of agricultural soils restoration is the foundation for balancing the human ecology. Many countries have committed to increasing soil carbon by 0.4% per year. As a global objective and given the highest priority it is a solution to critical problems of biodiversity loss, development, food security and resilience to drought and flood.

Rattan Lal talks about the potential to sequester hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon in soils and ecosystems. And carbon sequestration has major benefits in addition to offsetting anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion, land use conversion, soil cultivation, continuous grazing and cement manufacturing. Restoring soil carbon stores increases agronomic productivity and enhances global food security. Increasing the soil organic content enhances water holding capacity and creates a more drought tolerant agriculture – with less downstream flooding. There is a critical level of soil carbon that is essential to maximising the effectiveness of water and nutrient inputs. Global food security, especially for countries with fragile soils and harsh climate such as in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, cannot be achieved without improving soil quality through an increase in soil organic content. Wildlife flourishes on restored grazing land helping to halt biodiversity loss. Reversing soil carbon loss in agricultural soils is a new green revolution where conventional agriculture is hitting a productivity barrier with exhausted soils and increasingly expensive inputs.

This is the highest priority in a world of extreme poverty and wildlife losses. But at the same time there are a plethora of cost competitive technologies in different sectors and for different gases and aerosols with pollution reduction benefits. Implementation again depends on wealth. Rich economies can afford environments.

Cost competitive technologies in energy production are available. They include fracking that will enable the US to meet the Paris commitment – even if you are no longer signed up members. It includes high energy/low emission coal plants – ultra clean technology that is a key to near term energy production in India, China and Asia.

Energy innovation seems likely to breakthrough to cost competitive, low carbon sources within a decade. Modular nuclear has a road map – and requires only a private/public partnership to reduce the risk of first of a kind construction. Wind and solar are less certain requiring storage technology and cost breakthroughs to enable deep penetration. But when costs are right the energy landscape will be transformed in the creative destruction of capitalism almost overnight – certainly well before Jimmy’s deadline. It is ‘automatic’.

I don’t need to keep saying this – the world is moving on. But CE is a recalcitrant backwater of dinosaur thinking. You are still arguing the baby physics of greenhouse gases or the economics of wind, solar and electric cars. What you should be arguing there is the distorting and ultimately self defeating effects of subsidies. But that matters little in the big picture.

With regards your section on Greenland ice mass loss, I believe the calculations used are largely driven by measurement from the GRACE mission. I am not sure what other methods are used.

If the calculations are largely driven by GRACE mission data, I would like you to take a serious and considered look at this time lapse video of the information collected by GRACE.

What I would like you to make note of is the pattern of anomalies that Greenland exhibits, and more importantly the timing of the pattern and it’s synchronization to the Solar cycle, Solar and Geomagnetic field strength, and more importantly than anything else, the Solar magnetic field polarity.

My point being is that I do not consider the GRACE mission ice mass loss calculations to be valid. I believe the Solar polarity is either driving the gravitational anomaly pattern, or interfering with the data gathering making it seem as though it is. In either case, it invalidates the use of the GRACE mission as an instrument for accurately assessing ice mass loss or gain near the magnetic poles.

i believe that Solar magnetic strength and polarity is actually driving the pattern of gravitational anomaly. But this may not be the case. If not, the interference with the collection of data by directly influencing the satellites themselves, is still important.

Note the timing of the changes in the Greenland pattern, compared to that of the rest of the world.

Judith: FWIW, I thought your slides were awesome, particular the policy cart before the horse.

If I had to rebut your presentation I would:

1) Note that unforced variability plus “naturally forced” variability during the Holocene appears to have been no more the +/-1 degC. If climate sensitivity high (say 3 K/doubling or higher), projected changes in GHGs will result in warming that is much greater than 1 degC. If ECS is high, climate will be driven by a “CO2 control knob” and the “climate is dynamic” view will be irrelevant.

2) Challenge your statement that “Man-made CO2 emissions are as likely as not to contribute less than 50% of the recent warming.”

According to energy balance models, if 100% of observed warming were driven by known changes in forcing (which are almost all anthropogenic) then the central estimate for ECS is low,1.5-2.0 K/doubling. If only half (or less) of observed warming were forced and the other half were unforced, then the central estimate for ECS would be 1 K/doubling or less. Can ECS be this low?

Not likely. Combined WV+LR is positive. During seasonal warming, CERES shows that the planet emits 2.2 W/m2/K more LWR through both clear and cloudy skies. -2.2 W/m2/K using the standard sign convention. (AOGCMs predict the same value for clear skies, and positive, not zero, LWR feedback from cloudy skies.) If a) SWR feedback were zero, and if b) LWR feedback in response to seasonal warming were a good model for LWR feedback in response to global CO2-mediated warming, ECS would be about 1.7 K. For ECS to be 1 K/doubling or less, SWR feedback would need to be strongly negative, -1.5 W/m2/K. SWR feedback from cloudy skies would need to be somewhat more negative to compensate for positive ice-albedo (surface albedo) feedback. -2 W/m2/K of cloud SWR feedback is a 2%/K increase in reflection of incoming SWR (which is currently about 100 W/m2). That is a massive and improbable increase in reflection. (At the LGM, when it was perhaps 5 K colder, clouds would have been reflecting 10 W/m2 less SWR to space.) SWR feedback may not be positive enough to raise ECS from 1.7 to 3.7 K/doubling (+1.2 W/m2/K needed), but it is unlikely to be negative enough to lower ECS to 1 K/doubling (-1.5 W/m2/K) either.

In other words, given what we know about positive net WV+LR feedback, cloud SWR feedback is unlikely to be negative enough for ECS to be 1 K/doubling or less. Someday I like to hear your response to this line of reasoning.

No, Robert, I didn’t forget Planck response. When CERES is observing the change in OLR in response to seasonal changes in temperature, it is observing the sum of Planck response, water vapor feedback and lapse rate feedback when looking at clear skies and the sum of those three plus LWR cloud feedback when looking at cloudy skies. The data is very linear and definitive that the planet emits 2.2 W/m2/K more LWR as it seasonally warms. This is a response to warming in the NH and cooling in the SH, not “global warming” and therefore needs to be interpreted with caution. It implies ECS would be 1.7 K/doubling if there were no SWR feedback.

The SWR response to seasonal warming is not highly linear, shows some lagged components, and some features not relevant to global warming. Since the SH has little land with seasonal snow cover, the positive feedback in SWR reflected through clear skies is mostly the result of geography and unlikely to tell us about how global warming will change reflection of SWR.

The paper also shows how AOGCMs predict LWR emitted and SWR reflected from clear and cloudy skies should change with seasonal warming. Those predictions are clearly wrong, except for LWR from clear skies. Clearly AOGCMs aren’t up to the challenge of properly representing feedbacks and therefore climate sensitivity.

And yet it doesn’t figure in your narrative – the change in net outgoing all sky radiant flux is not remotely 2.2W/m2 – and the energy changes show up primarily in the oceans and not the surface. Following and very quickly changes in net flux.

Robert wrote: “And yet it doesn’t figure in your narrative – the change in net outgoing all sky radiant flux is not remotely 2.2W/m2 – and the energy changes show up primarily in the oceans and not the surface. Following and very quickly changes in net flux.

I surely hope you understand the difference between 2.2 W/m2 (a flux or forcing) and 2.2 W/m2/K (a feedback). The slope of the line for the change in LWR emission to space vs the seasonal change in surface temperature is about 2.2 W/m2/K. (The dashed line in Planck feedback 3.2 W/m2/K.)

Climate sensitivity is normally reported in units of K/doubling. The climate sensitivity parameter is reported in K/(W/m2) and the climate feedback parameter is its reciprocal W/m2/K. “A” climate feedback parameter for is something we can easily observe during seasonal warming and AOGCMs should agree with observations if they were any good at reproducing realistic feedbacks in response to seasonal warming.

IMO, Tushima and Manabe 2013 provides the clearest look at how or planet actually responds to warming because seasonal warming is huge. 3.5 K and the response is huge.

Franktoo,
“IMO, Tushima and Manabe 2013 provides the clearest look at how or planet actually responds to warming because seasonal warming is huge. 3.5 K and the response is huge.”

You might imagine this to be true, but the reality is that there a number of confounding epistemiological issues which makes interpretation of the seasonal fluctuations highly problematic. You mentioned only one – the averaging issue. Some years ago, I set up a 12-band latitude model to test the numerical effects of this approach. The approximate 4 deg C amplitude of the seasonal fluctuations (your “huge response”) represents the resolution of amplitude variation of upto 40 deg C over the year with the largest amplitudes towards the poles, and a variation in local absolute temperatures which range over around 100K. I will spare you the details of what I found, but I was able to demonstrate with realistic data assignment that you can have a planet which has an OLR response of 3.3 W/m2/K to a uniform temperature rise, but which displays a gradient of 2.2 W/m2/K from a crossplot of seasonal OLR vs temperature change. The result arises because the uniform warming case represents an areal weighting of the individual latitude feedbacks, while the seasonal warming (and cooling) represent a weighting of [area x amplitude of temperature variation], so you get two different case-dependent results. However, the averaging is not the only problem. The second issue is that there is a lot going on over the seasons which cannot be “forcibly explained” as temperature-dependent feedback. One important variation is in the axial rotational velocity of the Earth. During the year there is both an annual and a superposed biannual variation. The ocean currents and wind systems fluctuate in resonance with these changes, bringing about a change in meridonial heat transfer and a change in the distribution and fractional coverage of clouds. The range of OLR response at any given location is either increased or decresed by these changes, thus making it very difficult to draw any inferences about global response to a more uniform temperature change without a fully matched seasonal model.
There is an alternative data source for testing OLR response to temperature change, which should represent something closer to Earth’s response to heating by GHGs than does the seasonal variation, and that is quite simply the change in OLR response and mean temperature as estimated from satellite data over a period of Earth’s heating. If we consider the period 1979 to 2000, OLR increased by between 2 and 3 W/m2. Average surface temperature change was about 0.5 to 0.6K. This suggests an aggregate OLR response to temperature change of between 3.3 and 6 W/m2/k. The upper estimate seems improbable since it exceeds the expected S-B gradient at surface. However, the lower bound on the estimate is similar to the expected TOA Planck response. In other words the interannual data does not support your conclusion that there is a strong negative feedback in WV + LR, and appears to support a neutral or negative feedback in the LW.

The social cost of carbon depends on the discount rate one chooses for the cost of future damage. A mathematical economic theorem test us the optimum discount rate for such calculations depends on the sum of the current time cost of borrowing money and the future economic growth rate. Put more intuitively, if we expect our descendants are likely to be no richer or even poorer (due to depletion of resources and ecological damage) than we are today, we should use a low discount rate and be willing to pay a lot to avoid adding to our descendant’s challenges. However, if we expect human ingenuity to continue to produce economic growth, our far richer descendants will be able to afford adaptation (and probably will have found a cheaper source of energy than fossil fuels).

The choice between mitigation and adaptation logically depends on how one views the future. That is true most Republicans and Democrats. However, it is also true for the developed and developing world. Developing countries want to follow China’s recent high-carbon path to prosperity. Their people demand policies that will help them catch up with the developed world. Their expectations for economic growth are high and so is their discount rate. Logically, there is no way they should be willing to invest as much as the developed world in mitigation. And future levels of CO2 depend more on the increase in emissions by developing nations than on the increasingly expensive reductions in emissions by developed nations.

“The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.

The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.” https://thebreakthrough.org/archive/climate_pragmatism_innovation

“There are two sides, my side says climate will repeat cycles of the past, specifically I say the cycles of the past ten thousand years.”

Every scientists knows that the larger cycles will continue. Strawman.

“The other side says climate will do something it has never done before. I do bet against that side.”

Not the other side. Scientists know that both are true. This “either or” argument is silly. The longer cycles like Milankovitch will prevail in 10,000 year cycles. CO2 prevails in 100s of years, and is much faster than (dare I say the obvious) slower cycles.

Climate CAN be predicted, but one needs to indicate a timeframe. Northern hemisphere will be warmer in Summer, but we’re not talking about 1 year cycles. Milankovitch cycles are on a magnitude of 10,000s of years, and that’s not what were talking about. CO2 makes a noticeable change in 100s of years, and that’s what the topic is about.

Simple projections: CO2 is a primary forcing of past 100 years of warming, CO2 will continue to be a primary forcing for future warming.

Climate cycles have relative forcings and timescales. They are wheels inside of wheels, or curves on top of curves. Take a sine curve an tip it upwards, and you still have a since curve but there would be no doubt it was tipped.

Scott just managed to completely ignore the most notable controls on climate that are largely not understood, and then jumped to claiming with certainty that something will happen that has never happened before. In fact, the research I have read shows that water and air currents, and their resulting oscillations, have a greater influence over climate than orbital control within timescales that are relevant to humans.

In other words, his climate change mechanism that has no analog is certain, while climate change mechanisms that do have analogs are irrelevant.

The main control on the climate is the energy balance and that is well understood and well constrained. It is no surprise to climate scientists that record temperatures come as the forcing reaches its highest values.

And I did say that a realization might be in order – something that seems quite unlikely. That climate is deterministically chaotic is however – the scientific consensus.

“Sensitive dependence and structural instability are humbling twin properties for chaotic dynamical systems, indicating limits about which kinds of questions are theoretically answerable. They echo other famous limitations on scientist’s expectations, namely the undecidability of some propositions within axiomatic mathematical systems (Gödel’s theorem) and the uncomputability of some algorithms due to excessive size of the calculation.” McWilliams 2007

“However some scientists think that this is a misleading oversimplification. They regard climate as a complex nonlinear dynamical system, with no simple cause and effect. Climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways, owing to natural internal variability associated with large-scale ocean circulations.” Judith Curry

“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” IPCC 2001

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) defined abrupt climate change as a new climate paradigm as long ago as 2002. A paradigm in the scientific sense is a theory that explains observations. A new science paradigm is one that better explains data – in this case climate data – than the old theory. The new theory says that climate change occurs as discrete jumps in the system. Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain.

“Scott just managed to completely ignore the most notable controls on climate that are largely not understood”

BRILLIANT!

So let’s wave out hands and say “it’s too hard to understand” without even offering what is causing this temp increase.

The human body is complex, nonlinear, messy, and we don’t understand but a very small part of it. By your “logic” we cannot tell when you have a temperature and even f we can, it’s certainly not that festering wound with the infection. Nope, it has to be something we’re missing.

Robert: Your reply doesn’t really address my main point. Suppose: 1) We had a pdf for climate sensitivity that everyone was willing to accept. 2) Had a way to incorporate the unforced variability previously observed during the Holocene into that pdf. 3) Temperature change could be converted into damage ($) in a way that everyone agreed upon. 4) Everyone agreed to spend money on mitigation up to the point where $1 spent would save at least $1 in future damage. Even in this ideal world, we wouldn’t be able to reach an agreement on how much to spend on mitigation, because there would be no agreement on what discount rate to use when comparing the cost of current mitigation against the NPV of future climate induced damage.

This happens because the optimum discount rate for such calculations (according to a mathematical theorem) depends on expectations for future economic growth. Different countries and parties have different expectations of future economic growth and therefore should apply different discount rates.

This mathematical result can be expressed intuitively: If you expect your descendants are going to be much richer and more capable than you are, you will spend little to prevent them from suffering damage from future climate change. You will spend your limited money on the economic growth that will benefit both you and your future generations, especially if you perceive your group to be behind economically. If you are on top today and fear your descendants will be poorer than you are, you should spend a lot to avoid damaging their future.

IMO, this fundamental dilemma will prevent the developed and developing world from agreeing on a mitigation program – unless developed countries volunteer to pay for mitigation in developing countries (something I can’t conceive of happening).

“Climate is more like a kaleidoscope – shake it up and a new pattern emerges – than a control knob with a linear gain.”
Granted.
Is there no room then for a possible small climate knob with a small linear gain/loss each time the new pattern emerges?

The regimes have different means and variance. And we know that the trajectories of surface temperature change at the same time as ocean regimes shift. The radiative physics of greenhouse gases suggest incremental warming – but disentangling that from internal dynamic change seems problematic.

Robert wrote: “My point is that there are alternative strategies that have high benefit to cost ratios. Your point is therefore moot. If I don’t address your point it is because I disagree with your underlying assumptions.”

If AOGCMs are correct, your alternative strategies with high benefit to cost ratios are not expected to meet the proposed goal of cutting emissions 50% by 2050 and 80% by 2100 and leave half of our remaining fossil fuels in the ground.

I don’t care that unforced variability can’t be calculated properly by AOGCM because the Holocene record suggests unforced variability isn’t likely to negate a significant fraction of 3+ K of anthropogenically-forced warming. Even worse, it is just as likely that unforced variability will add to forced warming as it will subtract from it – at least until the next ice age.

If there is a broad approach to population pressures – e.g. http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/post-2015-consensus – a global commitment to restoring agricultural soils and ecosystems – that Rattan Lal says has a potential to sequester up to 500GtC – and technical innovation across sectors and gases – Frank’s targets are far too modest.

And he expects intrinsic variability is as likely as not to not revert to the mean? Hmmm…

“Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. Therefore, we should expect a degree of irreducible imprecision in quantitative correspondences with nature, even with plausibly formulated models and careful calibration (tuning) to several empirical measures. Where precision is an issue (e.g., in a climate forecast), only simulation ensembles made across systematically designed model families allow an estimate of the level of relevant irreducible imprecision.” http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709

But failing to understand the nonlinear math of climate models is not a great start.

Nonlinear systems can have forcings that force the results in a certain direction.

You need no math to know that a balloon tied to a fan that forces it upward (at a specific angle) is chaotic, and determining it’s position is impossible in a matter of seconds. This is weather.

You need no math to know that a change in the angle of the fan will cause this chaotic system to move all points in a certain direction. I will predict that the balloon’s average position will change, and I will be correct, no matter how many times you tell me I cannot possibly know this because “chaos” or “nonlinear math.”

We all know that atmosphere matters, and changes in atmosphere matter. We do know what greenhouse gasses and, and we do know that additional CO2 will change temps. We cannot know exactly how the dog will walk each year, but we know that the dog is heading more north each decade because some of us are watching the man walking the dog.

There is a discussion of magnetic pendulums above. If you start from a point the oscillator will settle over one magnet. If you do it 100 times you will inevitably start from slightly points and there will be one set of statistics. If you put a CO2 wedge under one side and run the experiment 100 times there will be a different statistics. An analogue of climate models – rather than a dog analogy.

“Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.” http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751

“Schematic of ensemble prediction system on seasonal to decadal time scales based on figure 1, showing (a) the impact of model biases and (b) a changing climate. The uncertainty in the model forecasts arises from both initial condition uncertainty and model uncertainty.”

Exactly, Robert. CO2 changes things, and that is why it is odd that there are so many people watching the dog. The wedge is large enough, so call it what you want.

We both know that CO2 is warming the earth, and most of us know that it is the primary forcing. For your example, if you tilt the entire apparatus Lorenz knew (as we all do) that you now know more, and you can predict that (for example) two of the ending positions will become more likely. Run it 100 times and you may get all 100 landing on one of two positions or even one.

Why people fail to recognize the order within chaos is amazing. We observe a warming earth, and some tell us its not warming (thanks Heartland.) We observe the rise of CO2, and some say it must be volcanoes (thanks Heartland and others.) We observe the nights warming faster than the days are warming (CO2) and a cooling stratosphere (CO2) and STILL they wave their hands and say “well, it’s complicated, so let’s give up.)

Scientists: Its complicate, but here’s what we know.
Non-scientists: It’s complicated, and we’re going to pretend it’s too complicated to know about CO2.

You make assumptions about the pendulum outcomes without doing the experiment. You fail to distinguish between models and climate. While the pendulum is a better analog to models than dogs or fans – it is not an analog for climate.

In the real world small changes – such as CO2 – push the system past a threshold and change then occurs at a rate determined by internal responses – abrupt and unpredictable – as a different behavior emerges in the system. This is seen in climate data at many scales. A dynamical systems explanation for Hurst effects in Nilometer data for instance – rather than infinite memory first proposed. All completely deterministic but seemingly random shifts in quasi standing waves in spatio-temporal chaos.

In the infinity dimensioned state space of the earth system anything is possible. Disruption of AMOC for instance – from small changes of polar surface pressure. Or increases in upweling in the eastern and central Pacific – with implications for global temperature and hydrology. These are not random changes that sum to zero – but dynamic changes with abrupt shifts between regimes that sum to perpetual change.

“What defines a climate change as abrupt? Technically, an abrupt climate change occurs when the climate system is forced to cross some threshold, triggering a transition to a new state at a rate determined by the climate system itself and faster than the cause. Chaotic processes in the climate system may allow the cause of such an abrupt climate change to be undetectably small.” NAS 2002

While the system is dynamically complex – it matters not at all for rational policy responses.

Something is going on here – but you don’t know what it is – do you Mr. Koontz?

“You make assumptions about the pendulum outcomes without doing the experiment.”

I’ve DONE the experiment.

You really have no clue what’s going on here, do you Ellison? You seem to be one of this people who quote articles and never performed the experiment, but worse have no clue how it applies to the topic at hand.

You should take a step back and see how far off base you are. You are fish in a barrel, but don’t know it.

Lastly, and possibly most damning, is that the “Hockey Stick” suffers from extreme heteroscedasticity. The distal variation is much higher than the proximal variation. In the year 1,000 temperature variation ranges from -0.8 to +0.4, in the year 1902 temperature variation ranges from -0.8 to -0.2, and then post 1902 the behavior totally changes with the introduction of instrumental data. Remember, there is nothing about the underlying physics of the CO2 molecule or GHG effect that would explain a temperature dog-leg of accelerating temperatures. (Click Here) Why this is so damning is that the extreme variation identified in the “Hockey Stick” occurred with extremely stable CO2 levels. CO2 levels between the year 1,000 and 1902 ranged between 275 and 285 ppm. CO2 simply can’t explain the extreme variation of the past 1,000 years. CO2 was essentially a constant, yet temperatures variations were much higher than today. Temperature variation around the year 1350 had a range between +0.5 to -1.0. If you substitute data that has been controlled for the Urban Heat Island Effect and H2O, temperatures post-1920 are stable, even though CO2 has increased over 30%. If Michael Mann understood his own chart he would understand that it does far more to rule out CO2 as the cause of warming, than it implicates CO2.https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/06/17/the-winning-strategy-to-defeating-climate-sophist-michael-mann/

Proxies are less accurate than direct measurements? Really? Thanks for that information. You are right, proxies are way way way less accurate than direct measurements. I didn’t chose them, Michael Mann did, and he deliberately didn’t use instrumental data until 1902. Central England does back to 1650, and there are plenty of other long term measurements he ignored. He also didn’t even try to control for H2O and the Urban Heat Island Effect. If you want to defend his work, go ahead, but it is pure nonsense.

Mann explains exactly why he uses proxies and instrumental data and when. You are pretending that he never did, which is disingenuous.

Most of the globe is water, and on land most is rural. The urban heat island stuff is too small to consider, and even if you do the BEST program showed that rural and urban areas are warming at the same rate.

If you want to throw straw men around about his work, go ahead, but it’s sad to see you make the same mistakes over and over again.

co2islife, do you understand that proxies are at individual small regions that would be expected to have much larger variations than a global average? The range of proxies says nothing about the global average, and you can see that when he helpfully averages them for you.

Jim D, I was trying to understand your point, and I think I understand it now.
1) Yes, Michael Mann modeled the N Hemisphere. CO2 blankets the globe, to the impact on the N and S Hemisphere is the same. The physics of the CO2 molecule does not depend upon the Hemishere.
2) Are you claiming that the Hockey Stick has not been used to defend CO2’s cause of Global Warming?
3) Why would CO2 impact the S Hemi differently than the N Hemisphere?
4) Michael Mann used proxies for 900 out of 1000 years. The error bands of these proxies is huge. 5 out of every 100 samples falls outside those bands.
5) The granularity of the proxies are nowhere near as granular as the instrumental data used post 1902, so they are comparing apples and oranges.
6) the instrumental data comes from areas far removed from the areas where he took the proxies.
7) the proxies are largely unaffected by the Urban Heat Island effect.
8) The little Ice Age isn’t present in the Hockey Stick, which was a global event. Statistical tricks like hiding the decline was most likely used to re-write history.
9) What about the GHG effect and even distribution of CO2 would allow for the Little Ice Age to be limited to the N Hemisphere?
10) My understanding is that some extended time periods were represented by a single tree ring. Tree rings can be impacted by far more than just temperature.
11) 10 years or more of granularity can mask a lot of important detail regarding the impact of CO2 and temperature. Ice Core Data is extremely non-granular, as is coral and tree rings. For Tree Rings, the best is you get is annual data.
Anyway, did I answer your concerns?

You seem to be fixated on what Mann did two decades ago. His was only the first paper of this kind, a pioneering effort. There is a lot more recent proxy data with global coverage that supports Mann’s trend and extends it back another 1000 years.
If you have complaints you need to look at the more recent work first and address that.

The new hockey stick. It’s a bit bent – but then so is Michael Mann. Does the end bit strike you as anything like the 20th surface temperature pattern? Or did they hide the mid century decline this time?

Proxies were given as 30-year averages, so the temperature record was given as 30-year averages to match it. Makes sense. If you don’t do the same thing for both on the same graph, people complain. Also it explains why you don’t see a 20th century decline. The 30-year periods I showed were 1880-1910, 1910-1940, 1940-1970, and 1970-2000. Not surprisingly each one after 1910 is warmer than the previous one.

Three decades of rancorous handwavium debate over evidence for and the physics behind the Radiative Greenhouse House Effect and man-caused climate change, aka CAGW.

What a waste since none of it is real.

The earth being 33 C warmer with an atmosphere is based on the difference between two completely unrelated made up numbers: 288 K, a wild ass guess pulled straight out of WMO’s butt and 255 K, a theoretical S-B BB ideal calculation for the 240 W/m^2 Long Wave Infrared Radiation leaving the top of the atmosphere.

Furthermore, the lunar studies by Volokin/Nikolov and Kramm clearly conclude that without an atmosphere the earth would be much like the moon, a barren rock with the lit/hot side maybe 390 K, the dark/cold side maybe 190 K and not even colder by 33 C.

Am I wrong?
Always possible – for all of us.
’cause if I’m not wrong decades of research, “evidence,” publications and billions of dollars goes straight in the dumper and the entire trillion dollar global climate change industry is suddenly unemployed.

“Dame Julia Slingo is a British meteorologist and climate scientist. She was formerly Chief Scientist at the Met Office between 2009 – 2016. She now undertakes a range of advisory roles nationally and internationally.”

(check out the Gresham lectures, there are some great ones, say old ones in math and astronomy. Uneven quality under the influence of PC recently)

Julia Slingo is wrong on a fundamental level – climate is not stable when not externally forced. It is characterized by perpetual internal change.

Climate models are not solutions of pure linear physics equations dating back to Newton and others – but are realizations of the third great idea of 20th century physics- deterministic chaos. As she well knows.

Climate change is not the critical issue of our time. Instead it is to build prosperous communities in vibrant landscapes, to restore the natural world, to ensure that desperately need low cost energy resources are available and to create a resilient and productive agriculture.

Emissions are being addressed pragmatically across a plurality of gases and sectors with a plethora of technologies and systems – underpinned by economic growth and development. Uncertainty creates the impetus to focus on pragmatic emission reductions regardless of short term climate variability. The bottom line is that the right questions to ask about climate change are not scientific but about appropriate responses to diverse human and environmental challenges.

The Nilometer? It is Hurst effects – dynamic regime shifts and persistence at all scales generated by deterministic chaos in the Earth system. These are responses in physical system as tremendous energies cascade through powerful sub-systems. To call it cycles is just a word without meaning.

That you do not understand and continue to insist on your simple memes at every slightest opportunity is the essence of futility. Going around and around – gold fish bowl unscience – is the picture of cognitive dissonance.

To call it bounded is a tautology – do you think that a chaotic system should behave differently than it has? But the ‘bounds’ from other data are much broader.

Moy et al (2002) present the record of sedimentation shown above which is strongly influenced by ENSO variability. It is based on the presence of greater and less red sediment in a lake core. More sedimentation is associated with El Niño. It has continuous high resolution coverage over 12,000 years. It shows periods of high and low ENSO activity alternating with a period of about 2,000 years. There was a shift from La Niña dominance to El Niño dominance some 5,000 years ago that was identified by Tsonis 2009 as a chaotic bifurcation – and is associated with the drying of the Sahel. There is a period around 3,500 years ago of high ENSO activity associated with the demise of the Minoan civilisation (Tsonis et al, 2010). For comparison – red intensity in 1998/99 was 99. It shows ENSO variability considerably in excess of that seen in the modern period.

Just finally had a chance to watch the debate/presentation. You did a fantastic, objective, scientific job with both your statements and your comments. As a non climate scientist the one thing that struck me is that you continued to appeal to what I would call the Popper scientific method, and maybe not recognizing the Fatal Conceit in display from the Penn State contingent.
If you have never had a chance to read it, I highly recommend the book of that title by F.A. Hayek. He was a Nobel economist but the concepts apply directly to this debate.
Thank you for this blog and for your always respectful demeanor. You are a rare voice in any of the modern “sciences”

Green Biofuels isn’t going to save any of our seaside bases. I don’t want Titley to save the world. Just our seaside bases. To let the rest of the world determine their fate with their contributions to SLR is foolish. When he talks about their situation now, he’s talking about politics and funding them with or without climate change. But he portrays the problem as climate change, missing the cause. One would think he understood causes.

Why doesn’t he say we have few icebreakers because of climate of change? It’s his fault we only have two icebreakers. Some Navy you got there. That was politics as well. We’ve known about SLR when he was serving. The background level. I am going to bet he didn’t do anything about it.

Because of these contiguous turbulent non-radiative processes at the air/surface interface the oceans and lands cannot possess an emissivity of 0.97, actual emissivity being 63/396 = 0.16. (K-T diagram)

Nicely done and I’m sorry you left academia. I very much enjoy reading well thought arguments on both sides and chuckle when one side refuses to make public raw data and methodologies. How many millenia would it take for Greenland to melt using the most aggressive IPCC projections?

The “why take the risk” CO2 argument doesn’t hold water with me. In my travels I’ve seen pollution and poverty on a scale that makes me wonder how thoughtful, caring people don’t understand helping the developed world develop is the most humanitarian and Earth friendly thing we can do.

You do understand that you, like all life you encounter on earth, are a carbon based life form whose every cell is composed of carbon constituents and whose every motion is powered by atmospheric cabon dioxide, photosynthesized to energy and nutrients.